Sramana Mitra: Let me try to parse what you are saying. In some cases, you go after Latin American companies where you can add value by introducing them into your Silicon Valley network. That is one of your value propositions to Latin American companies in the pre-seed stage. That’s one sector. You just provided an example of that.
You also invest in pure Silicon Valley companies where you provide Latin American networks in case they want to get into Latin America. That is another differentiated value proposition where you’re offering pre-seed financing and a Latin American network. These are two differentiated strategies in your investment that I have picked up so far. It seems like you also have a third kind of focus which is to find random good companies where you want to be pre-seed investors.
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Billion Dollar Unicorn Cloudera (NYSE: CLDR) listed in April last year. Many expected it to be a strong IPO, but the company has not done very well under public scrutiny. Recently, it reported its fourth quarter results where the weak guidance sent the stock to its lowest levels since it listed.
Sramana Mitra: This first customer went through. You got paid. What happens next?
Gero Decker: Then we started building a real organization. We hired our first sales guy. We went from a company that was four people with interns to 15 people over the course of 12 months. The interesting that we had for me as an entrepreneur is we had a lot of interest in what we were doing. Bloggers wrote a lot about us. Industry analysts wrote about us.
We had a lot of inbound interest, but nobody was buying. We thought that it was a strange situation to be in. You have all of these conversations but nobody signs. We later discovered that we were seeing the impact of the financial crisis. >>>
By Guest Author Anita M. Sands
A few months ago, I spoke about culture and microbehaviors at a tech company’s conference in San Francisco. To illustrate what “microbehaviors” are and how they can cause a feeling of exclusion, I described the difficulty I often have as an Irish person—unschooled in American sports—contending with the baseball metaphors my colleagues use all the time. >>>
Paul Daugherty is the Chief Technology & Innovation Officer of Accenture. He is the co-author of the book Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI.
His co-author H. James Wilson is Managing Director of Information Technology and Business Research at Accenture Research.
You can follow them on @ PaulDaugh and @HJamesWilson.
Human+Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI,” is available everywhere, including at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and walmart.com
Sramana Mitra: One other area along the lines of what you’re talking about that we are seeing is the notion of connectors. There are so many modular technologies in use right now. Enterprises are using so many different tools and so many cloud services. Connecting all these things together is a nightmare. It seems like there’s a whole connection layer opening up which also needs an infrastructure-level handling.
Eric Benhamou: We totally agree with that. It’s the same, general kind of opportunities. It’s dealing with contemporary, totally distributed, virtualized data centers where dependencies are extraordinarily complex and provisioning orchestration is also very complex. >>>