Thought Leaders in Sales 2.0: Carol O’Kelley, CEO of Salesfusion (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Have you been tracking this area of influencer marketing that is getting a bit of attention these days?

Carol O’Kelley: I’m not sure what you mean. I’m certainly interested in the idea of Masons and that there are gurus in particular areas that can have enormous influence, but I’m not sure if that’s what you mean.

Sramana Mitra: There are two trends that I’ve observed. We’ve profiled a bunch of different companies in some of these spaces. One trend is that there are people with significant influence. These are people who have huge social media influence. Maybe, through their blogs or LinkedIn accounts. In their niches, they are very influential people. There’s a company called Influitive founded by the founder of Eloqua. That one is focusing more on really mining your customers and turning them into advocates. I was wondering if you were tracking any of that work. >>>

Bootstrapping to $100 Million: Vacasa Co-Founder Cliff Johnson (Part 2)

Cliff Johnson: After law school, I ended up working at a tax firm in Colorado and gained a lot of experience there. I worked with a lot of small businesses and mid-sized businesses, which was very invigorating for me. I was interested in tax law but I was always more interested in their business story and figuring out where things were going well or what they were doing wrong. I next worked for a larger firm in Phoenix for about a year and a half working mergers and acquisitions, which I wasn’t very passionate about.

I moved back into a smaller firm in San Francisco doing tax law. I moved around a little bit after law school. I really dug into the companies and saw myself being more of an entrepreneur than being passionate about tax laws for the rest of my career. I was at a crossroads where essentially I was going to stay in law but was ready to start out on my own . >>>

Bootstrapping to $100 Million: Vacasa Co-Founder Cliff Johnson (Part 1)

Vacasa has bootstrapped to scale in the crowded vacation rental space. Read how!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Cliff Johnson: I actually have a fairly unique background, at least for the US anyway. I was born in New Jersey. I’ve lived there until about I was 12 and then moved to a small farm town in Missouri where we had an 80-acre farm. I learned a lot of different skills out there. That was my initial upbringing. My dad is a welder pipefitter.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you go to college?

Cliff Johnson: There’s this small school in Missouri called Drury University. It’s a small school in Springfield, Missouri.

Sramana Mitra: What did you study? >>>

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The entity that you sold to private equity was still REDC?

Jeff Frieden: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: You bought the Auction.com domain name and rebranded your original entity as Auction.com?

Jeff Frieden: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: It seems you’re doing hybrid auctions but you’ve expanded from residential distressed properties to commercial distressed properties. >>>

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You were still focusing only on real estate?

Jeff Frieden: Only on real estate. Then the market crashed in 2007. We were able to pivot very quickly to help out institutions like large banks that had a tsunami of foreclosures coming in when the market blew up. In 2007, we held our first ballroom auction during this crisis up in LA of 350 homes for Bear Sterns. There were 6,000 people. We ran half a million to a million dollar media campaign. We had this hybrid technology that we had built ourselves. We went on to build our own technology offshore. We started to play with doing it without the physical auction. All online.

Obviously, that grew very quickly because of the tsunami of foreclosures. Since 1983, I had started investing in commercial real estate in Orange County. If I made money, some would go into the bank, some would go into the stock market, some would go into my business, and a lot of it would go into buying commercial real estate. >>>

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You bought these parcels of land and you ran this auction. What was the outcome of the auction?

Jeff Frieden: We made a million dollars in one day.

Sramana Mitra: Oh, wow! Terrific!

Jeff Frieden: There were thousands of people there betting competitively on this land. It was the 1987 to 1988 timeframe. The real estate market was good then until the recession in 1990. We actually got a second one in before the market crashed in 1990. We bought 200 more right after that. When the market crashed, they had really built a lot of new homes and condominiums in Southern California. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bob Dufour, President of Fusion (Part 7)

Bob Dufour: It’s having someone who can start understanding the psychology of that consumer and the opportunities presented to digital retailers. At least in my experience, that’s a big missing gap for somebody who really understands those needs during that journey, especially as millennials start taking hold and as their purchasing power gets bigger. I think they’re used to 99 cents. Trying to sell something for $30 is going to be a real shock to them. These microproducts with microprices is going to be important. Technology integration, cross-device integration, and digital enablement of suppliers—those are the things that I would say are opportunities that jump out based on our business.

Sramana Mitra: Listening to you, I’m thinking about this article that I wrote a long time ago in 2007 for the first time. It’s a definition of Web 3.0 that I came up with, which is a formula: 4C + P + VS. The four Cs are content, community, commerce, context, with personalization and vertical search. You may want to look up some of that writing because a lot of what you’re saying is the commerce elements driving off any context.
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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bob Dufour, President of Fusion (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of trends, is there anything else that you want to share?

Bob Dufour: I think for me, it’s digitalization driving price transparency accelerated by these aggregators, and the importance of having ancillary strategy.

Sramana Mitra: What are some of the open opportunities in the general space that you would encourage entrepreneurs who are starting out to look at?

Bob Dufour: There’s a corollary to this. Think iTunes. So many of these ancillary products that people are trying to sell are analog products that they’re trying to digitize and sell in a digital environment. Our experience is that there’s this huge need for a lot of micro products. You don’t need to maybe sell this highly bundled ancillary product. Maybe, there’s just a component of it. Let me take an example of a travel insurance product that we’re familiar with. Maybe you don’t need to sell this bundled product. Maybe what somebody wants is just protection for their >>>