Achieving Product-Market Fit That Allows You to Build Billion Dollar Unicorns: Gaurav Dhillon, Founder of Informatica and SnapLogic (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Help me rationalize what’s happening right now in the market regarding late-stage valuation bubbles. We have two kinds of bubbles in the startup venture world. One is in the seed capital. In 2013, 70,000 companies were angel-financed. That’s too much actually. It’s great that they got angel-funded, but then if you look at the next level, it’s 1,000 venture funding or 70,000 paired down to 1,000. Technically, those companies probably need to be bootstrapped and they’re not going to be scalable venture-scale companies, which should not have been funded in the first place. A lot of people are going to take tax right off. That’s one part of the bubble.

I actually don’t think the early-stage venture capital Series A and Series B is in that much of a bubble. It’s more in the Series C, Series D, and in some cases, Series E, that is completely out of control valuation, right? Part of the issue that we’re going to have to resolve somehow is that the public market is not in a bubble. What is your analysis of this market? You recently raised money. What was your experience in navigating this market?
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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Damon Ragusa, CEO of ThinkVine (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Pushing that thread forward, let me then ask you an industry level question. Where are the technology gaps? It seems like the analytics infrastructure is lacking in a lot of the inventory that is sitting there. For example, online videos is very big right now. At the same time, for a lot of the online video platforms, while it’s engaging content and video advertising, what exactly is the analytics infrastructure lacking in terms of effectiveness of the advertising.

Damon Ragusa: Obviously, I’m biased. If you pull the right data out of those platforms, which you should be able to, there are plenty of good technologies. Part of the problem is some of the emerging media platforms can be protective of that information so there’s a lack of transparency in terms of data coming out of that. It all comes down to how you fill a bigger gap between analytics platform and data to support smarter decisions. One of the biggest buzzwords right now is programmatic buying—the ability to automate the acquisition of digital media. The real advantage of programmatic buying is the ability to take super-targeted information to play and make those buying decisions. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Damon Ragusa, CEO of ThinkVine (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: One of my observations which pertains primarily to electronic commerce is that the more we can attribute, the more we can tie the marketing and advertising and customer acquisition to actual purchases. As you know, one of the most effective ways of marketing e-commerce is through affiliate programs. It’s 100% performance-based. There are lots of sites and apps that have accumulated huge numbers of eyeballs that they’re not able to monetize today. If more and more of this gap that exists today between traffic, lead generation, and conversion into actual transactions could be bridged, that would really relieve a lot of the friction that exists today between advertising and commerce. Can you comment on that?

Damon Ragusa: You’re absolutely correct on that but there are a few challenges. Part of it is based on the realities of digital marketing. You hit on one point. You talked about affiliate marketing as a good example that can be 100% performance-based, but because it is 100% >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Damon Ragusa, CEO of ThinkVine (Part 3)

Damon Ragusa: What we do is consolidate data from a lot of different sources. There are three V’s of Big Data—Volume, Velocity, and Variety. Variety is my favorite V. I think you get more value by integrating a larger variety of data to explain the thing you’re trying to understand than just more of the same. Fortunately in this world, we get a lot of both. We get a wide variety of data and we use some nifty algorithms that we’re able to connect all these data—demographic, behavioral, sales, digital click stream—to a modeling framework that allows us to understand and start to simulate how individual people carry out their interactions with the brand and media, and how they buy within a category.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Damon Ragusa, CEO of ThinkVine (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of your business composition, are you a product business or a services business?

Damon Ragusa: That’s a great question and we’re both. When we started the company, we talked about being a Software-as-a-Service platform. We still do have a SaaS platform that delivers insights and allows our customers to essentially develop a more agile marketing process. We also provide services because without that, it’s difficult for a lot of these organizations to fully integrate the insights that come out of systems like ours and understand best practices and how to move forward. We have customers who view us as an extension of their marketing planning organization. There are other customers who work very hands-on with our software and have very little interaction with us. We provide both as part of our product and service, with a majority of our revenues from the SaaS platform. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Damon Ragusa, CEO of ThinkVine (Part 1)

The dream of digital advertising being 100% measurable and attributable is a myth. In this story, we kick around the issues with Damon Ragusa, CEO of ThinkVine.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Damon Ragusa: I’m the Founder and CEO of ThinkVine. My background is in events analytics. I’ve spent a couple of decades in the analytics field primarily supporting strategic marketing objectives across B2B and B2C businesses. ThinkVine is a marketing optimization software and services company. We provide four core capabilities to our customers—software platform for planning marketing, the ability to attribute >>>

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Torben Nielsen, Co-Founder of HealthSparq (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me what you think about industry movements, trends, and open problems.

Torben Nielsen: One of the things that I see as a major opportunity is that we, as a company, work very closely with health plans in providing that shopping experience. You can see treatment cost. You can see your benefit levels and out-of-pocket cost. One of the most fundamental things of an e-commerce site is that there’s a transaction. There’s instant gratification. We are just starting to move into that direction where you can actually purchase and say, “Based on these prices, I want this treatment at this hospital.”

If there’s a way to actually purchase that service at that price point and then embed the hospital delivery system into that overall experience, then you become much more e-commerce like and you start rounding out the overall shopping experience. It actually becomes a transactional >>>

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Torben Nielsen, Co-Founder of HealthSparq (Part 5)

Torben Nielsen: We actually got covered by Forrester Research back in 2012 on a 17-page research study. The study explored how Regence had managed to crack the transparency code and how we’ve managed to create an integrated experience for members where they could feel more like shoppers. The day that report was published, I went to management and said, “Spin us off as a company because we think there’s an opportunity here to take what we’ve created just for 2 million members, take it out to a national audience, and start selling it to health plans. Two years later, we got the funding for 12 employees. Twelve brave souls went over to a different building back in 2012. Today, we are 175.

Sramana Mitra: So it’s a corporate incubation spin-off, almost.

Torben Nielsen: Yes, it is.
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