M&A and VC activity In June 2007, Chicago based Cars.com added women’s automotive site Mother Proof to its network of car sites. The Cobalt Group has acquired has acquired Cowboy Corp., AutoTown and Dealix in the past few years. Autobytel Inc. has acquired a number of companies over the years. In August 2001, it acquired
SM: So, for a startup, the cleaning up of the dirty energy is a more viable problem to solve for the next 50 years. If you were running a company which was going to go after that market, what process would you follow? PC: First you have to figure out what you can do that
Much of the growth opportunity for Concur, in my opinion is in being able to effectively penetrate Small Medium Enterprise (SME) markets. Here, we discuss issues around market size and profitability of the sales channels. SM: Smaller deals, in the 1-20 range, you can probably close them all by phone and even in the mid
Here are some of the nuggets from the MIT Enterprise 3.0 event last night: * If you are an entrepreneur looking for opportunities to focus on, there are white spaces in the portfolios of larger players like Microsoft, Google and Cisco, especially in the area of Prosumer productivity and collaboration. Probably more built-to-flip models. *
SM: When you look around today, around us here in the Valley, are you involved in any of these clean tech / energy companies? PC: I have some friends who are involved in the clean tech, and that is interesting. I love and follow carefully the development of clean energy, or cleaning up dirty energy
Steve says he does not segment his customer base by size. I push, because I think he should. SM: You do not have any bias one way or the other? SS: Not at all. Our distribution strategy is to reach customers of any size. We have no concentration of revenue, by customer or by market
SM: You were dealing with this constantly at Raychem, right? You were bringing new products to market, you identified the markets well, but how did you bridge the technology development and the market? Take for example the first five products you mentioned; three worked and two failed – over the larger scope of Raychem what
A crucial advantage of any on-demand software model is the ability to reach into new customer bases. I press hard here to understand the demographics of the company further. SM: Help me understand your customer base a bit. Are you focused on Fortune 500, Global 2000 or are you focused on smaller companies? SS: Early