Sunday, December 30, 2012
Managing Startups: Best Posts of 2012
Here's my compilation of 2012's best posts about managing startups. I assembled similar lists at the end of 2011, 2010 and 2009. Many thanks to all of the authors. The generosity of the startup community is amazing, and these insights are invaluable to those of us who teach and coach aspiring entrepreneurs.
Apologies to authors whose work I've omitted. Please use comments below to suggest additional posts. Happy New Year!
Lean Startup
- David Aycan of IDEO on the value of prototyping multiple MVPs in parallel.
- Vin Vacanti on excuses that kept Yipit from launching early.
- Entrepreneur Graeham Douglas on lean techniques for rapid prototyping of physical products.
- Emre Sokullu of GROU.PS on software that is well suited for building MVPs.
- Ben Yoskovitz of GoInstant on the value of focusing on "one metric that matters."
- Ash Maurya published his book, Running Lean; he describes the Lean Stack -- tools for managing hypothesis testing -- in a two-part post.
- Joel Spolsky on the costs of different types of software inventory.
- Glenn Kelman of Redfin on how running lean without deep product conviction can lead entrepreneurs to pivot too quickly and build mediocre products.
- Dan Milstein of Wingu in a video from the 2012 Lean Startup Conference on conducting a "5 Whys" session.
- Trevor Owens of Lean Startup Machine on different approaches for validating assumptions.
- A video from the Lean Startup Conference of Lean Startup Machine SF 2012 winner, Chef's Table, discussing their pivots and hypothesis tests.
- Other videos from Eric Ries's Lean Startup Conference.
Business Models
- Bill Gurley of Benchmark, David Beisel of NextView Ventures, and Seth Rothman of Greylock on key factors for success in building online marketplaces.
- Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures on revenue models for online commerce sites.
- Rishi Shah of Digioh on optimizing freemium pricing for SaaS; David Skok of Matrix Partners on why churn matters so much with SaaS models.
- M. Wensing presents a taxonomy of different types of freemium offers.
- Entrepreneur/angel investor Brian Balfour on solving the chicken & egg problem with network effects businesses; Sangeet Choudary writes about platforms and network effects, e.g., the impact or reverse network effects on social media.
- Tristan Kromer shows how to use a business model canvas based on "Puppies-as-a-Service" as an example.
Customer Discovery and ValidationMarketing: Demand Generation and Optimization
- Cindy Alvarez on applying customer development techniques with different types of customers and on when to NOT use surveys.
- Laura Klein on how to use personas, how to overcome reservations about shipping an early product version, and the importance of validating a problem, not a product.
- Brent Chudoba on using surveys to validate pricing, messaging, and other key decisions.
- Blake Masters' summary of Peter Thiel's Stanford CS183 lecture on distribution, marketing and sales.
- Rob Go of NextView Ventures succinctly summarizes marketing fundamentals and their relevance for startups.
- Renee Warren of Onboardly offers comprehensive coverage of marketing basics in KISSmetrics' "Ultimate Guide to Startup Marketing."
- Sean Work of KISSmetrics and Zach Bulygo describe best practices of high-converting websites.
- David Skok of Matrix Partners on adapting marketing and sales tactics to stages of the customer buying cycle.
- Entrepreneur/angel investor Brian Balfour offers tips for testing user acquisition methods.
- Eric Siu offers tips for structuring A/B tests; Lance Kidwell on the same topic with specific application to landing pages.
- Tyler King offers tips for monetizing a blog.
- John Koetsier shares pointers for marketing a mobile app.
Sales and Sales Management
- Bootstrapper Robert Graham offers advice on cold calling early customers via email.
- Steve Blank on the challenges of closing a complex B2B sale with multiple decision influencers; Mark Suster of GRP Partners on the same topic.
- David Skok provides a link to a Bridge Group report on metrics and compensation data for SaaS inside sales.
- Mark Suster on when to hire sales people in an early-stage startup and how to choose them.
- Mark Roberge of HubSpot on how to use analytics to build a scalable sales team.
- Brent Adamson et al. on how/why the best sales reps avoid "talkers" who superficially show enthusiasm but are unable/unwilling to mobilize organizational support for a purchase.
Viral Marketing
- Rahul Vohra of Rapportive on modeling viral growth.
- Vin Vacanti of Yipit on ways to drive virality.
PR StrategyBranding/Naming a Startup
- Susanna Gebauer of exploreB2B on managing PR.
- Leo Widrich of Buffer on how to get press coverage.
- Chris Dixon offers tips on interacting with the press.
- Cezary Pietrzak offers tips on naming a startup; Andrus Purde of Achoo on the same topic.
- Robert Laing presents a case study of rebranding his startup, Gengo.
- Mike Troiano offers startup branding tips.
Product Management/Product Design
- Laura Klein on dealing with customers' aversion to feature/interface changes.
- Cindy Alvarez on what you will/won't learn from usability testing.
- Martina Lauchengco of Silicon Valley Product Group on the role of product marketing.
- Marty Cagan of SVPG on time-boxed product discovery and on continuous product discovery as a natural extension of continuous software deployment.
- Cagan on the difference between old and new school product management, and on the difference between live-data prototypes and production software.
- Adam Nash of Greylock on the responsibilities of great product leaders.
- Eric Ries on the product manager's lament with waterfall software development.
- Jacques Murphy on the challenges of introducing product management to a startup.
- Ben Yoskovitz on the product manager's role.
- Andrew Chen on Square's concept of product leaders as "product editors."
- Jayson DeMers of AudienceBloom on outsourcing pitfalls.
Business Development
- John O'Farrell of a16z describes how quality trumps quantity and clarity regarding mutual objectives is crucial in doing business development deals, using Opsware's transformative distribution agreement with Cisco as a case study.
Scaling
- Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge Capital (and my colleague at HBS) on scaling challenges; see also Jeff's case studies of scaling at TripAdvisor, Akamai, and athenahealth.
- Paul Graham of Y Combinator on why startup = growth, and a response from Mark Suster.
- Jeff Jordan of a16z on how eBay managed growth.
Funding Strategy
- Blake Masters' summary of Peter Thiel's Stanford CS183 lecture on the motives/methods of venture capitalists.
- Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge Capital on passive vs. active VC seed investors.
- Rob Go of NextView Ventures on trends impacting seed funds and why VCs have a 20% equity ownership target.
- Rob's partner David Beisel on how to select investors in a seed VC syndicate and on the motives of different types of angel investors.
- Mark Suster of GRP Partners offers a primer on fundraising, discusses when investors in the same round should get different share prices, and reviews the pros/cons of convertible debt
- Suster on super pro rata rights; Beisel on the same topic.
- Attorney Scott Edward Walker offers a primer on convertible note terms.
- Dave Balter of BzzAgent offers advice for angel investors.
- Blake Masters' summary of Peter Thiel's Stanford CS183 lecture on how to pitch VCs.
Founding Process
- My colleague Noam Wasserman published his book, The Founder's Dilemmas, that describes tradeoffs that founders confront when deciding when/with whom to found, how to split equity, how to divide roles, etc.
- Blake Masters' summary of Peter Thiel's Stanford CS183 lecture on the importance on early founding decisions.
- Charlie O'Donnell of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures on questions that co-founders must address ASAP and the concept of the "minimum viable team," i.e., the smallest set of skills needed to get traction in an early-stage startup.
Company Culture, Organizational Structure, Recruiting and Other HR Issues
- Ben Horowitz of a16z on the concept of "management debt" (i.e., bad people decisions with long-term consequences -- the HR equivalent of technical debt) and on how accountability separates good companies from bad ones.
- Horowitz on how to integrate "old people" (i.e., senior executives from big companies) into a startup.
- Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital on the risk of promoting managers too quickly.
- Blake Masters' summary of Peter Thiel's Stanford CS183 lecture on company culture: where it comes from/why it is important.
- Horowitz on building company culture.
- David Beisel of NextView Ventures on the importance of office space configuration in building a startup.
- Tips on hiring developers from Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot; Avi Flombaum of the Flatiron School; Iris Shoor of Takipi; and a great Quora thread.
- Recruiting best practices discussed by Fred Wilson of USV; Charlie O-Donnell of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures; Ben Yoskovitz of GoInstant; and David Beisel.
- Chad Dickerson of Etsy on the link between recruiting and company culture.
- Thoughts on firing employees from Chris Dixon and Fred Wilson.
Board ManagementStartup Failure
- Fred Wilson of USV on managing startup boards.
- Mark Suster of GRP Partners on the board observer role.
- Jessica Livingston of Y Combinator analyzes reasons why startups fail, as does Andrew Montalenti of Parse.ly.
- Startup Genome infographic on causes of startup failure.
- Michael O. Church on the ethics of "failing fast."
Exiting By Selling Your Company
- Chris Dixon of a16z on the economic logic behind talent acquisitions: when/why "make vs. buy" decisions favor buying; he also offers these notes on the acquisition process.
- John O'Farrell of a16z on deciding when to sell.
- Tobias Peggs on what life is like inside a big company after an entrepreneur sells.
The Startup Mindset and Coping with Startup Pressures
- Paul DeJoe of Ecquire on managing the pressure that comes with being a startup CEO.
- Steve Blank on why it matters how co-founders fight.
- Blake Masters' summaries of Peter Thiel's Stanford CS183 lectures on the role of luck in startup success and on "founder as victim, founder as god." Fascinating stuff!
- Steve Blank on the challenge of distinguishing between vision and hallucination in charting a startup's course.
- Andrew Chen on dealing with the "trough of sorrow" following a big bump in traffic after a TechCrunch story.
- Paul Graham of Y Combinator on "black swan farming," i.e., coping with the facts that: 1) the vast majority of returns are concentrated in a few startups, and 2) the most successful startups often don't look very good at the outset/
- Graham on how to get startup ideas and on generating/coping with frighteningly ambitious startup ideas.
- 50 startup lessons learned by James Maskell, founder of Vinetrade; startup lessons learned by Vin Vacanti.
- Andreas Klinger of LOOKK on how/why founders lie to keep doing things in their comfort zones
- Serial entrepreneur/angel investor Jason Calacanis on the two biggest questions founders need to ask: Will customers recommend my product, and will they remember it?
- Investor James Altucher on how to survive your 1st year as founder/CEO.
- Chris Dixon: once you take outside money, the clock starts ticking.
Management Advice, Not Elsewhere Classified
- Mark Suster of GRP Partners on why you should never negotiate one deal point at a time.
- Entrepreneur Karl Treier on preparing a startup of technical due diligence (e.g., questions about scalability, disaster recovery, etc.)
- Ben Horowitz of a16z on how/why a CEO should deliver effective feedback.
Career Advice (Especially for MBAs)Startup Hubs
- David Beisel of NextView Ventures offers advice for incoming MBAs who want to launch a startup upon graduation.
- Andy Rachleff of Wealthfront provides data on startup compensation levels and advice on negotiating pay packages.
- Entrepreneur Bryan Goldberg offers advice on building personal wealth in Silicon Valley startups.
- From Naysawn Naderi, the case against aspiring entrepreneurs pursuing an MBA, and a counter-argument from Mike Gozzo.
- Reflections from entrepreneur Ryan Allis on what he's learning at business school.
- A personal account from Michelle Wetzler on why she left consulting for a startup job.
Tools for Entrepreneurs
- Brad Feld of Foundry Group and TechStars has published the book Startup Communities, a guide to building an entrepreneurial ecosystem.
- Beyond Steve Blank's Startup Owner's Manual, a book he co-authored with Bob Dorf, here is a list of the fantastic resources Steve has made available to the startup community -- mostly for free.
31 comments:
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Great list. The automation will not have high quality of content compared to hand curated list.
fyi,
ReplyDelete
I run http://www.founderweekly.com/ which sends out the best hand curated content related to startups and entrepreneurs every week.Thanks for the suggestion Sudarshan. I've been in touch with LinkedIn about this.
DeleteTOM : Great stuff. Great service by pulling it together. @margaretmolloy (HBS Class 2000).
ReplyDeleteThanks, Margaret: we've all come a long way since Marketspace!
DeleteAmazing list-- love it. Under "Lean Startup" you might add a recent TC article, "The Maximum, Beautiful Product" as a good alternative voice / counterpoint. http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/31/the-maximum-beautiful-product/
Jason Goldberg of Fab.com has been writing some great articles on viral marketing, pivots, and scaling a fast growing ecommerce business: http://betashop.com
Under "Tools" keep an eye out for Foundersuite.com...clever tools for startup founders (fin, ops, IR, etc.)...launching in 2-3 weeks. :)
ReplyDeleteThanks, Nathan: I added Glenn Kelman's "Maximum, Beautiful Product" post. The message that founders need a strong vision to guide their pivots is an important one, and one that Eric Ries would agree with 100%. Thanks as well for pointing us to Jason Goldberg's blog. There's some fantastic, very useful data on Fab.com's performance there.
Deleteawesome list! missing advice on advisors, best series of posts i know is here: http://marcoullier.com/blog/2011/09/date-your-advisor-before-getting-married/
ReplyDeleteBB: thanks, the advice to use a trial period for advisors is good, and holds for other venture participants, too, including many employees.
DeleteNice list of startup posts. Will go through the other years to see what is similar and what is not to try to spot some trends. Question to you - what is your criteria to determine what is a good startup post and what is not.
ReplyDeleteThere's no science behind the choices; e.g., they aren't based on traffic. I read a bunch of blogs regularly, and follow links to posts on blogs that I don't follow. I capture posts I might want to refer back to in Instapaper. Then, I spend a day sorting through the best stuff. My criterion, essentially, is: Did I learn something that seems worth passing on to my students and other aspiring entrepreneurs?
DeleteGreat list Tom...you are clearly really organized as this was a ton of work to pull together. I wish more women were writing things you find worth sharing...to encourage the next generation of entrepreneurs. Maybe we are all too busy building our businesses and haven't graduated to VC/Board/Advisor world. :)
ReplyDeleteJules: I do share your concern -- fewer than 10% of the posts are by women. But that may reflect the demographics of the startup community. A study by VentureSource showed that women represents only 7% and 3% of senior managers at successful startups (IPOed or sold) and unsuccessful startups, respectively http://buswk.co/Uobt7F Likewise, according to Kauffman, women represent fewer than 10% of VC partners http://bit.ly/UobPen So, we have a long way to go. But there's some good news at the top of the funnel: in the last few years, the % of HBS MBA grads joining startups has been about the same as the overall % of the class that's female, i.e., about 40%.
DeleteThis is an exciting list, Tom, and I intend to read or re-read each post.
Given my work, I went straight to the posts on recruiting and hiring and wanted to mention a couple more. One of the most memorable posts on hiring that I read this year was by Steve Blank: "Hiring: Easy as Pie" http://steveblank.com/2011/08/22/hiring-easy-as-pie/
Also, you mentioned a couple of excellent posts from Fred Wilson's MBA Mondays series on "People" including posts by Fred and by Chad Dickerson. Although there were several other great posts from that series, there is one that I believe deservs special mention, by Dr. Dana Ardi: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/08/mba-mondays-guest-post-from-dr-dana-ardi.html
Again, thank you. This is a remarkable resource!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Donna: I missed the Steve Blank post in my 2011 roundup. And I like the emphasis on looking for candidates' emotional commitment and self-awareness in the Dana Ardi post.
ReplyDeleteSorry, Tom, missed that the S. Blank post was from 2011 -- thought I had read it this past year! Well, it definitely made an impact if I still remember it so vividly.
Again, thank you for this gem of a list.
DeleteFantastic list Tom, thank you. Surprised however that there isn't much on engagement and user habits.
ReplyDelete
Here's a quick video: http://www.nirandfar.com/2012/09/desire-engine-in.html
and my posts on Techcrunch on the topic: http://techcrunch.com/tag/nir-eyal/
Thanks again!That's a great list. Too much to read :)
ReplyDelete
I would say gapingvoid.com also provides really inspiration stuff for entrepreneurs. Though Hugh MacLeod draws cartoon but they hit soul of every entrepreneur.
In addition to that I feel there are several entrepreneurs who have done 1 or 2 not startups and when they blog they write ground level wonderful experiences without too much jargon. StackOverflow.com founder's www.codinghorror.com is another asset.
thanks a lot again.
Awesome list of best posts in 2012
# Written mostly after Thanksgiving. Wrapped up sporadically for whatever reason, on whatever flight, or on whatever couch I seem to find myself on. Today it’s a couch in Denver after a day in the mountains… In a rented Jeep. #
Dwolla is coming up on its 2 year anniversary. There are a million huge milestones for us to celebrate—hundreds of millions in some cases.
I believe the most value I can offer you this week is not giving you a list of everything I want you to know about the last few years and only sharing what is beautifully perfect and what was apparently predictable only to us. I don’t believe there’s value in that.
The last two years, and the two before, weren’t easy. Very few things just happened. There are more than a few times I wondered if the sun would come up, and I’ve had more than one person come up too fast, or didn’t have relevant knowledge and give me really bad advice. I own each decision I made. Polling people for their thoughts has helped me make better decisions.
There are a few things I want to leave with my team and my community. We’re riding a wave, but the wave isn’t big enough yet. We have much work to do and much to learn. So as we enter this next phase, the best thing I can do is be honest about the harder lessons I’ve learned as a founder this year.
The apparent timelines to building companies are more often than not complete fallacies. I think my contribution can be more honest than leading you to believe otherwise. Building a company is lonely and much worse in the beginning. Reading about all the breakthroughs everyone else has (who live somewhere else) doesn’t make it any easier.
So here are some of my harder lessons learned. More than one has come close to costing me everything once or twice over. Some I had to relearn this year.
Most people will not tell you when they are pissed off at you. Value those who do.
Passive aggressive people suck, and they’ll cost you a fortune—metaphorically, emotionally, and literally. Start appreciating the people who tell you what they think from the get go. Learn to question those who are always complimenting you.
Compliments don’t teach you much. Unless you’re Prince William, Ashton Kutcher, Justin Bieber, Elon Musk, or a very humble Ben Silberman … you’re just not that great, and you have a lot of work to do.
Even then, I’d put every dollar I’ve ever earned in this lifetime on the fact that every one of those people I mentioned know the difference between ass kissing and necessary feedback. The more successful you become, the more you have to say no and proactively surround yourself with people who contribute to your company’s goals, don’t burn time talking about yesterday or plans they’ll never act on.
Find the doers who tell you the truth. Then find more of them. When you recognize passive aggressive behavior, point it out. If it doesn’t get resolved, end the relationship.
People will make promises. When they don’t keep them, it’s on you.
Advice and promises will come in like a river once you start hitting milestones. Initially, you’ll want to hold those promises and favors until you need them. The easiest way to manage that, in my mind, is never rely on them. Most promises and favors aren’t as genuine as you’d like them to be. Remember, this isn’t personal for the other guy. It’s not their company. It’s yours.
The right people will respond when you need them, but most people won’t. There’s nothing wrong with that. People get busy. Don’t beat yourself up about it.
You’ll be wrong most of the time. Try to make the right decisions all of the time.
As a team member in an early stage company, you’ll astound yourself by the number of times your assumptions are complete garbage. You’ll make the wrong decision only to have to redo it later.
Recognizing mistakes and acting on them are more important than being perfect.
The more times you’re right, the faster the company grows and the better off everyone else is as well. Pretty simple.
Appreciate when you’re right, but don’t think it’s a common theme. Tomorrow you’ll be wrong about something. Assume it was a fluke and push yourself to be right again and again.
Everything really does cost twice as much. no matter how good you are.
All your assumptions are garbage (like your business plan), and recognizing that early will keep you humble. It’s unlikely your spreadsheet is right three years from now.
- Someone will cost more to bring on.
- Someone will cost less.
- You’ll get sued.
- You’ll end up refiling patents.
- Healthcare costs will rise.
- You’ll misunderstand a software license that will cost a fortune.
- One machine you budgeted for won’t cut fast enough, so you’ll need two and more space.
This will all happen at virtually every moment when you’re awake. You can control product, and a lot of other things, but there’s more you can’t control.
You typically plan for the best scenario in your head. Most of the time it doesn’t go that way.
Life isn’t as linear as a business plan.
be careful who you sell your company to
This was the most brutal lesson for me, because I couldn’t do anything about it once it became obvious things were borked. It has cost me months of sleeping and countless hours wondering what I did wrong.
I spent ages 19 to 25 building my first company. While most of my friends were in college, I had employees to pay.
When I left the company, I rationalized it this way:
I had grown up and it was time to do something bigger. It was a part of life similar to when you enter school as a college freshman and come out a doctor or lawyer. You’re not the same person on the other side. I figured why couldn’t the same be said for being an entrepreneur? I went in green and came out a much better person.
It is amazing what you learn.
I put everything into building the parts of that company. Anyone close to me can attest to that. It’s taken me months to realize it’s not mine anymore. There are no next steps for me there. My heart might be in what I built, but the day I signed that contract I had no power to change anything.
Learn to let it go the day you sign it over, or else you’ll be forced to let it go when you least expect.Be thoughtful about how you do it, and even if you think it’s done perfectly, you’ll probably find the new owners do a lot of things you don’t love. That’s life.
Just because someone has more money than you, It doesn’t make them smarter
The earlier you are in the process of founding companies, or having some huge breakout, (measured differently where you’re living) the more harmful this can be. You run the risk of taking advice from people who know absolutely nothing about your business.
I can’t count the number of times a wealthy individual gave me advice that I couldn’t wait to hear and put straight to work. In retrospect, most of it was really bad advice, but there were a few golden nuggets that changed my life.
Truth is, they probably know more than you about something, but you know a lot more about your company. Have the confidence to push on their advice. You’ll be amazed how fast they’ll sit up and dig in. Many times, the advice will change the more context you give, and you walk away better off.
Feedback with no context is a bullet into a dark room full people. I don’t see how it ends well.
middle men are expensive
In many situations there are moments where someone says “I don’t know, but I’ll go find out”. These personalities should be applauded given they actually do what they say. These folks typically don’t make things up, and they get to people with answers. There are two things to be self aware of…
- Do they come back with a solution in an acceptable amount of time?
- Is the answers always “I don’t know, but I’ll go find out”?
These two things are indicative of much bigger problems. If you cater to it, you’ll end up doing the work yourself. Nip it quickly.
When in doubt. Ship.
Which is what I’m doing with this post after weeks of pondering it’s relevance.
If you’re not shipping, you’re dead.
That’s it. You’ve reached the end of my mini novel. Hopefully one of these results in one or two people having a “ah-ha” moment that saves them some time in 2013!
go. BE AWESOME.
- Ben Milne
- January 6, 2013
- regular
- 2012, lessons learned
http://allthingsd.com/20121214/beyond-marketing-clouds-the-age-of-machine-lea...
The advent of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Adobe Marketing Cloud demonstrates the need for enterprises to develop new ways of harnessing the vast potential of big data. Yet these marketing clouds beg the question of who will help marketers, the frontline of businesses, maximize marketing spending and ROI and help their brands win in the end. Simply moving software from onsite to hosted servers does not change the capabilities marketers require — real competitive advantage stems from intelligent use of big data.
Marc Benioff, who is famous for declaring that “Software Is Dead,” may face a similar fate with his recent bets on Buddy Media and Radian6. These applications provide data to people who must then analyze, prioritize and act — often at a pace much slower than the digital world. Data, content and platform insights are too massive for mere mortals to handle without costing a fortune. Solutions that leverage big data are poised to win — freeing up people to do the strategy and content creation that is best done by humans, not machines.
Big data is too big for humans to work with, at least in the all-important analytical construct of responding to opportunities in real time — formulating efficient and timely responses to opportunities generated from your marketing cloud, or pursuing the never-ending quest for perfecting search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). The volume, velocity and veracity of raw, unstructured data is overwhelming. Big data pioneers such as Facebook and eBay have moved to massive Hadoop clusters to process their petabytes of information.
In recent years, we’ve gone from analyzing megabytes of data to working with gigabytes, and then terabytes, and then petabytes and exabytes, and beyond. Two years ago, James Rogers, writing in The Street, wrote: “It’s estimated that 1 Petabyte is equal to 20 million four-door filing cabinets full of text.” We’ve become jaded to seeing such figures. But 20 million filing cabinets? If those filing cabinets were a standard 15 inches wide, you could line them up, side by side, all the way from Seattle to New York — and back again. One would need a lot of coffee to peruse so much information, one cabinet at a time. And, a lot of marketing staff.
Of course, we have computers that do the perusing for us, but as big data gets bigger, and as analysts, marketers and others seek to do more with the massive intelligence that can be pulled from big data, we risk running into a human bottleneck. Just how much can one person — or a cubicle farm of persons — accomplish in a timely manner from the dashboard of their marketing cloud? While marketing clouds do a fine job of gathering data, it still comes down to expecting analysts and marketers to interpret and act on it — often with data that has gone out of date by the time they work with it.
Hence, big data solutions leveraging machine learning, language models and prediction, in the form of self-learning solutions that go from using algorithms for harvesting information from big data, to using algorithms to initiate actions based on the data.
Yes, this may sound a bit frightful: Removing the human from the loop. Marketers indeed need to automate some decision-making. But the human touch will still be there, doing what only people can do — creating great content that evokes emotions from consumers — and then monitoring and fine-tuning the overall performance of a system designed to take actions on the basis of big data.
This isn’t a radical idea. Programmed trading algorithms already drive significant activity across stock markets. And, of course, Amazon, eBay and Facebook have become generators of — and consummate users of — big data. Others are jumping on the bandwagon as well. RocketFuel uses big data about consumers, sites, ads and prior ad performance to optimize display advertising. Turn.com uses big data from consumer Web behavior, on-site behaviors and publisher content to create, optimize and buy advertising across the Web for display advertisers.
The big data revolution is just beginning as it moves beyond analytics. If we were building CRM again, we wouldn’t just track sales-force productivity; we’d recommend how you’re doing versus your competitors based on data across the industry. If we were building marketing automation software, we wouldn’t just capture and nurture leads generated by our clients, we’d find and attract more leads for them from across the Web. If we were building a financial application, it wouldn’t just track the financials of your company, it would compare them to public filings in your category so you could benchmark yourself and act on best practices.
Benioff is correct that there’s an undeniable trend that most marketing budgets today are betting more on social and mobile. The ability to manage social, mobile and Web analysis for better marketing has quickly become a real focus — and a big data marketing cloud is needed to do it. However, the real value and ROI comes from the ability to turn big data analysis into action, automatically. There’s clearly big value in big data, but it’s not cost-effective for any company to interpret and act on it before the trend changes or is over. Some reports find that 70 percent of marketers are concerned with making sense of the data and more than 91 percent are concerned with extracting marketing ROI from it. Incorporating big data technologies that create action means that your organization’s marketing can get smarter even while you sleep.
Raj De Datta founded BloomReach with 10 years of enterprise and entrepreneurial experience behind him. Most recently, he was an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Mohr-Davidow Ventures. Previously, he was a Director of Product Marketing at Cisco. Raj also worked in technology investment banking at Lazard Freres. He holds a BSE in Electrical Engineering from Princeton and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — Sumo Logic, the next-generation log management and analytics company, today announced that it has closed a $30 million Series C funding round led by Accel Partners, with participation from existing investors Greylock Partners and Sutter Hill Ventures. The latest round brings the company's total venture capital funding to $50.5 million, and will allow Sumo Logic to expand research and development, and increase investments in sales, marketing, and other go-to-market resources.
"Sumo Logic's powerful analytics engine, coupled with its highly-scalable architecture, provides enterprises with a compelling cloud-based solution for monitoring and analyzing machine data," said Ping Li, partner at Accel Partners and responsible for Accel's Big Data Fund. "With Sumo Logic, IT and Operations teams can generate actionable insights that transform the business."
Sumo Logic helps enterprise IT professionals search, analyze, monitor, and visualize big data in real time, enabling application and infrastructure troubleshooting within data center, cloud and hybrid environments. As a native cloud solution, Sumo Logic eliminates the need for on-premise log management equipment and dedicated personnel, delivering a petabyte-scale platform that gives companies immediate access to valuable operational insights. With Sumo Logic, organizations benefit from rapid time-to-value and do away with expensive professional services and costly deployment models. This funding round will support the expansion of Sumo Logic's continued innovation and increased market presence within the log management and data analytics spaces.
Less than a year after the company's public launch, Sumo Logic has seen rapid adoption from large-scale enterprise clients including Netflix, enabled broad access to its services through its popular Sumo Logic Free offering, and provided deep enterprise value with innovations like LogReduce™, push analytics, and real-time dashboards.
"This new round is validation of our vision and innovation as a company, and testament to the traction we are seeing in the marketplace," noted Vance Loiselle, president and CEO of Sumo Logic. "The funding positions us well to aggressively expand our powerful cloud-based analytics and log management service to a very broad section of the market."
Learn more about Sumo Logic
- Sign up instantly and for free: http://www.freesumo.com
- Watch the Sumo Logic product overview video: http://bit.ly/sumodemo
- Attend the Sumo Logic Webinar on Dec. 11: http://bit.ly/realtimeinsights
About Accel Partners
Founded in 1983, Accel Partners has a long history of partnering with outstanding entrepreneurs and management teams to build world-class businesses. Accel today invests globally using dedicated teams and market-specific strategies for local geographies, with offices in Palo Alto, California, New York City, London and Bangalore, as well as in China via its partnership with IDG-Accel.Accel has helped entrepreneurs build over 300 successful companies, many of which have defined their categories. Accel's Big Data Fund aims to fund transformative early stage and growth companies throughout the Big Data ecosystem, from next generation storage and data management platforms to a wide range of revolutionary software applications and services including data analytics, business intelligence, collaboration, mobile, vertical applications and many more. Accel's past Big Data investments include Cloudera, Couchbase, Dropbox, Fusion-io, Lookout, Nimble Storage, Origami Logic, QlikView, and Trifacta.
For more information, please visit the Accel Partners web site at www.accel.com. Find us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/accel.
About Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic is the next generation log management and analytics company that leverages Big Data for real-time IT insights. The company's cloud-based service provides customers with real-time interactive analytics at unprecedented petabyte scale. The Sumo Logic service is powered by patent-pending Elastic Log Processing™ and LogReduce™ technologies, and transforms log data into actionable insights for IT operations, application management, and security and compliance teams. Unlike expensive and complex premise-based solutions, the Sumo Logic service has a low TCO, can be deployed instantly, scales elastically and requires zero maintenance. The company is based in Silicon Valley and is backed by Accel Partners, Greylock Partners and Sutter Hill Ventures. For more information, visit www.sumologic.com.Connect with Sumo Logic
Read the blog: http://www.sumologic.com/blog
Follow on Twitter: http://twitter.com/sumologic
Visit on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Sumo.LogicAdd to DiggBookmark with del.icio.usAdd to Newsvine
© Marketwire 2012
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