Do It For Me Analytics: Anil Kaul, CEO of Absolutdata (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you’re doing pure product, the customer is supposed to run the product and build an organization around the product. In this case, you are building that organization and you’re doing the business process on behalf of the customer.

Anil Kaul: That is correct. The only thing I would add to that is that the product piece here is something that we are building ourselves as well.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, which is true for a lot of the Do It For Me (DIFM) SaaS-enabled BPO companies. If you look at Athenahealth, for example, they are one of the most successful healthcare IT public companies. They focus on addressing the collections issue that physicians face – interfacing with insurance companies, filing the right codes, and so forth. For a small physician’s office, it’s a nightmare to do collections. They build proprietary software and a lot of artificial intelligence and they outsource the whole collection process on behalf of the physician’s offices. >>>

Do It For Me Analytics: Anil Kaul, CEO of Absolutdata (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: All your core customers today are based on your Mckinsey network essentially.

Anil Kaul: Not anymore.

Sramana Mitra: But that’s how it got developed.

Anil Kaul: In the beginning.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the business dynamics. Typically, outsourcing companies have a certain model. There’s a certain profitability structure. They are not as profitable as a product company would be just because products get built once and sold many times. Even though it takes more investment to build a product company, once it starts to scale, it provides a better profitability structure. >>>

Do It For Me Analytics: Anil Kaul, CEO of Absolutdata (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Give me some examples of a typical client situation.

Anil Kaul: For example, our client wanted to optimize their advertising spend. This was a company here in the Bay Area. It’s an online company and they had been doing a lot of spending. At some point in time, they decided to run a TV campaign. The TV campaign was very successful, but they were not able to figure out what part of sales was being driven by TV versus what they had been doing online. We helped them understand that as well as optimize their spend.

They have a marketing budget of about $250 million. One of the big issues there was they thought that TV is not as successful as we showed it to be. They cut their budget on TV spending. What we were able to show them was that over half of their search traffic was coming because of their TV advertising campaign. They continued supporting their TV spend, which they wouldn’t have done otherwise. >>>

Do It For Me Analytics: Anil Kaul, CEO of Absolutdata (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: This is happening in 2007, yes?

Anil Kaul: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: When you decided to make the switch, did you have analytics customers? Did you have an analytics product in mind? Had you built anything?

Anil Kaul: It was small. I would say about 10% of our business was analytics at that time. We saw that as the big opportunity going forward. We then started building the analytics product at that point in time.

Sramana Mitra: What was the revenue of the company at this point? >>>

Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What data were you collecting and what was the process of collecting that data?

Rakesh Gupta: Any marketing activity in any company actually falls into three or four different kinds of marketing. One is, people using the phone to reach people. People are using email to reach people or people are doing door-to-door marketing. All people are sending physical direct mail. These are really the large portions of marketing that gets done in a local organization. Then, we added to it things like Google and Internet marketing.

Sramana Mitra: That’s just the parameters.

Rakesh Gupta: To answer your question, what’s important to an end user is a platform to slice and dice the data. But what do they need to slice and dice the data? What they need is the following. They need the kind of business a business is in. That’s very important to them. They need highly granular information on businesses. They need to know how many employees work at that business and what the annual sales is. >>>

Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to when you started this company. What did you do to get this off the ground?

Rakesh Gupta: The first thing was to figure out, with some level of clarity, what space are you going to go after. As our dear friend in Omaha, Warren Buffett, always says, “There has to be a level of clarity in your circle of confidence.” We had to figure out our circle of confidence that we can shine in. The first thing we had to do was define it clearly. That’s the first thing we did. That’s how the three things that I talked about came about. >>>

Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What happened to that company in the end?

Rakesh Gupta: That company became part of a large corporation. It’s still part of Reed Elsevier. They still have whole group called Reed Travel Group (RTG).

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at Reed?

Rakesh Gupta: I was there for three years.

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to the end of the decade, right? >>>

Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I think there are clear winners. At the time that you were describing, Facebook wasn’t the clear winner by any stretch of the imagination. Once you have clear winners with massive market cloud, then those are the options that are being offered by other sites.

Eyal Magen: Right. What also happened is that obviously the user is now moving quickly between different screens – mobile, home computer, and work computer. Any service that wants to provide them with a unified experience across screens will have to ask the users to identify. These are the reasons why identity is becoming so central. We eventually became an enabler for sites to connect with a user using their identity to save the identity and user data, and most importantly, to connect to third-party systems that can leverage the user third-party data for marketing or personalization. >>>