How to Manage A Successful Pivot: Bullhorn CEO Art Papas (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I get the whole vertical workflow woven into your product. Can you provide some examples of what somebody who’s buying a Salesforce.com CRM system would not be able to do versus your system? Let’s say recruitment vertical. What’s an example of workflow that’s specifically designed in your product?

Art Papas: A great example I use all the time is how many times, as a sales person, have you walked into a meeting and you’re there to pitch something new to the customer. You’ve been servicing the account and you’re there to say, “I’ve got something new I want to talk about.” But they open the meeting with, “I want to talk to you about this that occurred over the last three weeks with your team.” Your entire meeting is just blown out of the window because you can’t pitch a new business idea when you’re not delivering on the business you sold last time you were in there.

In the staffing industry, we would hear that from customers all the time, “I need visibility into the performance of my team.” An interesting invention that came out of that was one of our developers said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could give the sales rep a bird’s eye view into all the communication activity over email with that customer and all the contacts?” We came up with some really cool ways to organize that >>>

How to Manage A Successful Pivot: Bullhorn CEO Art Papas (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Before we go on to 2008, give me a bit more detail about the strategy of building the business. You started with this recruiter CRM system as you described it. How much business did you do in the recruiter vertical? It sounds like that’s you’re primary vertical in the beginning, right?

Art Papas: It was. In many ways, it’s still an important part of what we do. Those early customers were all in the recruiting industry. We branched out to more professional services from there because those were natural corollaries. Now, we have commercial real estate, accounting, and all sorts of different types of business. Back then, it was just the recruiting industry.

We got to know more about that industry than I ever thought I would. We engaged deeply with customers to understand how they sell to customers. When they land an account, how do they expand it over time? What are the challenges they face? How do they differentiate from the competition? How can we help them have a better leg up? >>>

How to Manage A Successful Pivot: Bullhorn CEO Art Papas (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Was it a large recruiting firm?

Art Papas: It was mid-sized. There was about 45 people. It wasn’t a huge business. For them, all of a sudden, they’re able to service national accounts. It was a big deal during the recession. He was really looking for ways to get his business going. He was now able to deliver an outsized growth rate even in the recession compared to the rest of the industry. It was a great outcome for him.

We went to our investors and said, “We have this amazing thing that we’ve stumbled into. We should be a CRM for vertical markets and focus on these niche industries.” The investors hated it. They wanted nothing to do with it. They were like, “The Internet thing seems like a fad. Who’s going to buy a CRM software from the Internet?” We could not raise money from an outsider. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Jack Norris, CMO of MapR (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: For the last set of questions, I’d like you to put on an industry thought leader hat. What trends do you see in the market as it pertains to where you are operating? What’s coming out on the horizon? What are you anticipating? What are some open problems as it pertains to those trends? Where do you encourage new entrepreneurs to look for new business opportunities?

Jack Norris: First of all, you have to take a step back and look at the context in which these Hadoop innovations are happening. Let’s look at the data center today and how it’s changing. We’re in the middle of the biggest re-platforming of the enterprise. It’s really challenging a lot of the assumptions that dictate how data is organized and treated today. You have a separate storage network for computing, a separate production system, and separate analytic silos that separate, not only in terms of systems, but also in terms of time where it takes at least a day to get the data over into the analytics system. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Jack Norris, CMO of MapR (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If you were to synthesize some of the top use cases, it sounds like you have a mission-critical use case in retail and other kinds of Internet applications. Could you double-click on that and outline some of the mission-critical use cases?

Jack Norris: If you look at how organizations are using it, Hadoop is a journey. Typically, it might start out as a cluster that’s used to support data scientist to do some analysis to better understand some aspects of the business. It tends to rapidly move into more of the application space where it takes production data and integrates analytics and processes them together.

There’s over 50 different use cases in a single customer. 18% of our customers have 50 or more use cases running on a single cluster. It can be quite diverse not only across customers, but even within a customer. Some of those relate to top line. How do they roll out new products and >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Jack Norris, CMO of MapR (Part 1)

MapR has innovated on the Hadoop Open Source building blocks to build a suite of products currently used by hundreds of customers across verticals. This interview double clicks down on some of the use cases, as well as entrepreneurial opportunities in the Big Data field.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to MapR. Tell us who you are, what you do, and a bit of your own personal background.

Jack Norris: I’m the CMO at MapR Technologies. MapR is a Big Data leader with its hot-ranked distribution of Hadoop. As part of our offerings, we have the top-ranked Hadoop, top-ranked NoSQL database, and top-ranked SQL on Hadoop solution. We’re helping organizations transform their business and be more effective by being able to better leverage data. We’re seeing companies do that in a way that actually impacts their business as it happens. >>>

Successful Pivot to $5M in Revenue from Chicago: Cohesive Networks CEO Patrick Kerpan (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: We are huge believers in content marketing. That’s the only kind of marketing that we do.

Patrick Kerpan: We clearly lost some opportunities but for a small company, we would never hear from customers until they were POC complete. They’d go to Amazon. They’d use the free edition. They had tried it and they probably have something up and running. Now, they needed to grow it. We put in place a mechanism where we didn’t want to hear from a customer unless they were close to completing proof of concept. Rather than having big, wide funnels, we would have 15 leads at 60% probability.

Sramana Mitra: In general, any kind of inbound leads are very good news. If it’s an inbound query or request, you’ve won half the battle.

Patrick Kerpan: Right, but you don’t have that kind of pipeline where you put everybody you’ve ever met in the pipeline and they’re all a million dollar deal with 10% probability. You just get killed with all that talking. The other thing that’s different is I think we got the pricing right. There’s some competition now. >>>

Serial Bootstrapper: Oversee and Manage Founder Fred Hsu (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What do you want to do? You’ve had one successful exit. You’re in a financially comfortable position. You’ve built a second company that is also bootstrapped and very profitable. You’re still fairly young. What do you want to do with your business? How are you thinking about your choices and options now?

Fred Hsu: For me, it’s all about people. From a business perspective, I want to make sure my founders and the employees who stuck around see similar success to what I’ve seen in the past and also take enough knowledge from what they’ve learned here to their next startup. On a personal side, I have two children. They’re three and five. I want them to see daddy work. I don’t play golf. I’m not going to be home in my bunny slippers. I don’t even have slippers. Probably work, life normalcy, and high aspirations for my co-founders, employees, and my kids.

Sramana Mitra: Do you want to continue running this company and growing this to a much larger scale? Or do you want to exit this company and start another one? >>>