Scholarships to 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Awarded to NetApp Startups

The One Million by One Million (1Mby1M) global virtual accelerator is yet another benefit granted to NetApp startups through a partnership between the two companies. NetApp has awarded six startups one-year scholarships to the 1Mby1M Premium program, offering them the advantages of access to the 1Mby1M curriculum and weekly online mentoring sessions.

The participating startups include:

• Anlyz – Co-founders Sriram G and Parkavi Ramasamy. Anlyz is an innovation-empowered cyber security firm that creates smart solutions to obliterate tomorrow’s threats today. Their sophisticated approach to cybersecurity is a pioneered multidisciplinary one – where they leverage new-wave technologies and standards to provide continuous real-time visibility enabling prediction, detection and prevention of incidents leading to a shortened response lifecycle. Their products adapt and scale to small, medium and large enterprises.

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Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Steven Aldrich, Chief Product Officer of GoDaddy (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Switching a bit, there’s a tremendous amount of innovation that you have to probably keep your eye on. The pace of startups has picked up tremendously. The number of companies that got seed-funded in 2013 was about 70,000. Since then, now there are 700,000 seed funds. These vary. Some are pre-seed, seed, post-seed, and pre-Series A. It’s a whole spectrum.

The number of companies getting seed funding is about 100,000 a year but the number of companies that actually get venture financing is only about 1,200 to 1,500. I imagine that for a company of the scale of GoDaddy, there’re a lot of opportunities to interface with the startup community out there that are innovating

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Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Steven Aldrich, Chief Product Officer of GoDaddy (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There’s an interesting question that comes up in that context. About a couple of years ago, Xerox PARC did several days of brainstorming with about 44 Fortune 500 Chief Innovation Officers. This point of hackathons versus business cases of innovative ideas came up. I did a half-day session with this group.

One of the questions that came up is, “Should you be developing stuff first or should you first be figuring out the business case for an idea?” Of course, there are multiple schools of thoughts on that. I happen to be of the opinion that you shouldn’t be developing stuff. You should first figure out whether there’s a business case or not and then develop. I’m curious what your thought is there. >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Steven Aldrich, Chief Product Officer of GoDaddy (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This workflow that you described are ideas that are coming from customers and have been picked up and identified by the product organization. Do you have any kind of internal innovation or intrapreneurship program that nurtures grassroots intrapreneurship within the organization?

Steven Aldrich: We don’t have a separate team. We have a framework that we’ve taught everybody around horizon-thinking. This is a concept that, I think, McKinsey had originally come up with where you have existing businesses who are paying the bills. They’re called horizon one businesses. You have your growth businesses where things are growing faster than the overall portfolio.

In a company like GoDaddy, we have many products, some of which are growing quite fast. Those get additional resources. >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Steven Aldrich, Chief Product Officer of GoDaddy (Part 3)

Steven Aldrich: We started to realize that our view of identity and digital identity needed to be expanded not just around the domain but we also needed to think about the phone number as a part of the identity. We then talked to customers, looked at the existing products in the market, and looked at ways that small businesses use their mobile devices as part of their daily lives.

We saw a real opportunity because we saw these business owners using a singular phone number. Generally, they’re personal cell numbers that they were putting onto their website or business cards. Their personal calls and business calls were getting all intermingled. They were losing control and data from their interaction. >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Steven Aldrich, Chief Product Officer of GoDaddy (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like the narrative around which you’re building the product portfolio is increasingly getting online and getting the word out about the fact that you’re online.

Steven Aldrich: From the small business owner and the folks who are getting ready to start their business, that is the number one outcome that they want. They don’t have enough customers or revenue, and they need to be found on the web or social media. As they start to bring those customers in, they need to communicate and build the brand. Then the business grows. Now, they need to communicate and collaborate. Grow is a relative term in this case. Most of these business owners rarely get above five employees. Very few people get above 20 employees. >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Steven Aldrich, Chief Product Officer of GoDaddy (Part 1)

This conversation delves deep into the nuances of how a sophisticated product organization thinks about new products through customer-driven innovation, internal innovation, as well as external ecosystem-driven innovation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce you and GoDaddy a little bit so we can set context that frames our conversation today.

Steven Aldrich: I have been very fortunate to work with entrepreneurs. Many of them wouldn’t call themselves entrepreneurs. I spent some time in Intuit in their Quickbooks team. I spent some time as an entrepreneur. Now I’ve been at >>>

210th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Steven Aldrich, GoDaddy, On Corporate Innovation

Steven Aldrich, Chief Product Officer, GoDaddy, delves deep into the nuances of how a sophisticated product organization thinks about new products through customer-driven innovation, internal innovation, as well as external eco-system driven innovation.

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