Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You wanted to make the switch to a product company with a hypothesis that this is what you think is needed in the market. You wanted to switch off your consulting business and turn it into a product company in 2011?

Ali Behnam: A big part of the product that we had built was taking all the different use cases that we were solving for our customers. Different customers have different use cases. Through our engagement with various customers, we had seen a lot of different use cases that we needed to satisfy for our product to function properly. We wanted to make sure that the first iteration of the product could actually satisfy a lot of those use cases because those were the common problems that we were seeing among many customers – not just the ones that we were consulting. Thanks to our consulting background, we were able to see so many problems that prospects face and we ended up building up a product that could satisfy those use cases. >>>

Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 2)

Ali Behnam: Early on as we got engaged in our analytics practice, we realized that there is a big need for help with tagging. A lot of customers were unsatisfied with their analytics implementation. The number one cause of that dissatisfaction was the fact that their implementation was not done in a proper way and that has to do with tagging. Tagging is basically putting a piece of code on a website that allows you to capture the right data and send that data to the analytics solution. A lot of customers had challenges associated with that. We realized that there is a big need for streamlining the tagging work that customers need to do.

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Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Three years of web analytics consulting led Ali and his co-founder to identify a core customer need around which he is now building a high-growth, venture-funded company.

Sramana Mitra: Ali, let’s start with your own personal journey. Where were you born and raised? What kind of story leads up to Tealium?

Ali Behnam: I was born in Iran. Our family migrated outside Iran after the revolution. We actually ended up finding ourselves in France, which is where I got my high school degree. Later on, I came to San Diego for my college education at UC San Diego. I just fell in love with San Diego. Following my graduation, I decided that San Diego is where I want to spend the rest of my life.

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How To Fund a ‘Fat Startup’

These days, we focus a lot more on lean startups than startups that require capital to get going. The entire industry has moved away from the ‘fat’ startup category. Investors expect that you will have your product launched, customer acquisition model fleshed out fully, and a team in place before Series A.

However, infrastructure software, hardware, networking, chips – they need capital. Even in cloud software, to build complex technology like personalization and analytics requires some investment.

While in the 1M/1M program, we steer people mostly along lean startup paths, I have pondered and investigated the question: How do people fund the ‘fat startups’ these days?
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Of God and Financial Markets

Steve Blank recently wrote a scathing piece on Silicon Valley’s demise: Why Facebook is Killing Silicon Valley.

I teach entrepreneurship for ~50 student teams a year from engineering schools at Stanford, Berkeley, and Columbia. For the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps this year I’ll also teach ~150 teams led by professors who want to commercialize their inventions. Our extended teaching team includes venture capitalists with decades of experience.

The irony is that as good as some of these nascent startups are in material science, sensors, robotics, medical devices, life sciences, etc., more and more frequently VCs whose firms would have looked at these deals or invested in these sectors, are now only interested in whether it runs on a smart phone or tablet. And who can blame them.

Of course, Steve was referring to the intense speculative flight of capital to social media and mobile apps, a trend that the recent WhatsApp acquisition by Facebook for $19 billion is going to take to its logical and illogical extreme.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Alastair Mitchell and Andy McLoughlin, Co-Founders of Huddle (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s say I had my first Huddle account set up because I’m a client of WPP. My employer is also going to use Huddle, what happens? Do you create duplicate accounts? How does that resolve?

Andy McLoughlin: You have your own account. You’re paid for by whoever is managing your account. If you’re a WPP employee, you’ll be paid for by WPP.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Alastair Mitchell and Andy McLoughlin, Co-Founders of Huddle (Part 6)

Alastair Mitchell: There’s been lots of news flicking around about how people’s entire personal online lives have been hacked through telephone phishing. Companies like Apple and Amazon who have incredibly strong hardware, software, and security in place have their security negotiated because the processes they had in place allowed a human operator to give out key information. This is exactly the kind of thing that we have been very focused on for a long time. The accreditation of ISO 27001 is absolutely key for not only the security of the information in data centers and in transit but also the security of our offices and processes.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Alastair Mitchell and Andy McLoughlin, Co-Founders of Huddle (Part 5)

Andy McLoughlin: The other key trend is the mobile trend. The way that people expect to work has changed. The idea of the office as ‘four walls that you’re in from nine to five and forget about when you leave’ has disappeared. I think we are all 24-hour knowledge workers now. Combine that with the fact that we have a minicomputer which fits in the palm of our hands that is as sophisticated and powerful as the one at your desk five years ago. It’s amazing. You look at the whole industry that has blossomed around the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomenon and the ability for businesses to leverage the fact that their users are spending money on hardware has changed the way that CIOs think about capital outlay.

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