AI is making it easy to build ultralight startups. AI is also making it easy for copycats to flood the market with competing products. Investors HATE a market full of copycats. If you are looking to raise funding, you have to be able to establish a defensibility thesis. By and large, if you are building
By Gabe Zichermann, Guest Author By now, I’m sure you’re familiar with the story of Pong, Atari and the founding of the modern videogame business. In the time before the Atari 2600’s ubiquitous brown box and its legions of cartridge-crazy followers, computer scientists and nerds had long toiled to bring games to the emerging technology
SM: Besides culture issues, can you talk about the business strategy decisions that helped you survive the perfect storm? ZR: A big key for us was maintaining focus. When we started the company, our two first deals out of the gate were $2M each. Then the perfect storm happened, and we could complain about it.
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
SM: Describe some of your team building experiences. Is your management team complete now? KR: Finding the right executive team members can be a nerve-wracking experience. You are essentially giving a huge amount of responsibility to a person who in many cases you’ve only known for a few weeks during the interview process. A key
SM: What stage are you at now? Revenue? Profitability? Traffic? Customers? Users? Any other metrics you track? KR: We launched our service in Q2 of this year, and the response has been fantastic. We’ve already signed up our first set of paying customers, which is a great milestone for us. Initially, our primary goals are
SM: Describe the value proposition of LucidEra, including differentiation versus the rest of the market. KR: LucidEra combines sales and financial data to give users at small-to-mid sized businesses powerful insight into the effectiveness of their entire sales operations process (including quotas, pipeline, revenues, and expenses). We firmly believe that just like the everyday consumer
From McKinsey Quarterly: A social revolution will soon transform China, and multinationals that do business there can’t afford to ignore it. So far, they have mostly focused on the country’s tiny minority of urban-affluent consumers. But as more Chinese migrate to the cities for higher-paying work, they are steadily climbing the income ladder. By 2011,