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Disinfecting Hospitals, Impacting Healthcare: Morris Miller, CEO of Xenex (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The Internet was not yet on the horizon.

Morris Miller: The Internet was not there. When I was in Law School, I read an article in the Forbes magazine. It talked about how Steve Jobs had just raised money for NeXT computer.

Sramana Mitra: My husband used to run NeXT computer.

Morris Miller: They published this article and there was this one line in the article that said, “These NeXT computers are going to have read-write CD-ROMS and you’ll be able to put a library’s worth of information on a disk.” I called my dad and said, “When you’re in Law School, they >>>

Disinfecting Hospitals, Impacting Healthcare: Morris Miller, CEO of Xenex (Part 1)

Morris Miller was an original investor in RackSpace, and ended up running the company for almost seven years. Following RackSpace, he is now building a super interesting company in disinfecting hospitals and saving lives. Read on. Exciting stuff!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were your born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Morris Miller: I was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. My father is a physician. My uncle is a physician and there was every expectation from the family and me that I would become a physician. I went to public school all the way through school. Then, as a sophomore, I decided to go to Felis Exeter Academy up in New Hampshire. I was the only one to go to boarding school.

Sramana Mitra: You returned to Texas though for your college or did you stay back in New England?
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Building an Internet of Things Platform Company from Zaragoza, Spain: Alicia Asin, CEO of Libelium (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: So all the selling that you do around the world is done through your Spanish operation. You sell on the phone and web.

Alicia Asin: Yes, most of the sales are direct sales due to inquiries through our websites. This year, we started opening distribution channels. Now, we have existing distributors covering most of the European territory, Singapore, China, Japan, South Korea, India, New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, and US as well. This list is growing every month.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. I think I’ve got your story. Is there anything else you want to share?
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Serial Entrepreneur Building a Luxury Business: Trevor Traina, CEO of IfOnly (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is your customer acquisition strategy?

Trevor Traina: We have a two-part strategy. The first is we partner with a lot of high-caliber organizations like American Express. We’ve partnered with them particularly for their premium cardholders. We work with Sotheby’s for their top collectors worldwide. We work with private clubs in different organizations. We offer a level of access, which we call membership, which is our most premium access through our partners. The second part of our strategy is that we leverage our participants. We call them luminaries. When we add a new luminary on the platform, they go out to their social media following and alert them as to what they’re doing on IfOnly.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. In terms of building this company, what has been your financing strategy? I imagine you bootstrapped it to get the proof of concept. After that, what happened?
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Building an Internet of Things Platform Company from Zaragoza, Spain: Alicia Asin, CEO of Libelium (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Other than universities, are there any other vertical trends that you see in terms of kinds of companies – retail, logistics, or healthcare? Where are you seeing the projects?

Alicia Asin: Because we are a horizontal platform, we have customers not only in universities but also in system integrators and communication companies.

Sramana Mitra: I understand. This is more of a trend question. What kinds of killer apps are you seeing? What segments are coming up with IoT killer apps than others.

Alicia Asin: The first one is Smart cities. It’s a dynamic segment in the IoT. It’s surprising that agriculture seems to be a mature market where we also have a lot of innovators willing to test technologies.
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Serial Entrepreneur Building a Luxury Business: Trevor Traina, CEO of IfOnly (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What did you want to do with it though? What was the concept? What concept were you trying to execute on?

Trevor Traina: I had observed a number of things after 2008. I had observed that my friends and people I knew were less and less interested in buying more physical things and were directing their spend and time towards experiences — experiential living. What I realized was that while there are many wonderful marketplaces for physical things, there really was not a place where you could go and shop for experience. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to create the first true marketplace for experiences rather than things?”

Sramana Mitra: What would you categorize as an experience?
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How Startups Can Apply Design to Create Superior Customer Experiences

By Guest Author Soren Petersen and Paul Hagen

For a startup to succeed, it must do more than simply develop a clever product or evolve features that mimic an incumbents’ value propositions. Rather, it must design customer experiences that substantially improve the value propositions by a magnitude. Why? Because new capabilities like cloud-based computing, digital distribution, crowd-sourced funding, and global outsourcing make product-focused innovation easy to mimic. Thus, reputation and word-of-mouth that derives from a customer experience play an ever critical role in success. >>>

The Sweet Spot for Startups

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

Successful startup founders are fueled by passion, a willingness to take risk and do whatever is necessary to make things happen. What they initially lack in financial capital, they more than make up for in human and social capital. So, how do startup teams most effectively match their limited resources and time to a cut-throat market and technology environment? How do they obtain funding and move down the road to becoming profitable? >>>