Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Craig Powell, CEO of Motus (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What trends does your work highlight in the context of mobile and social adoption?

Craig Powell: One thing that’s very relevant right now is what’s called the California 2802 Employment Regulation, which requires employers to fairly and accurately reimburse their employees. This has come up in some of the recent Uber and Lyft lawsuits related to how they’re reimbursing or capturing mileage for their drivers. There are about six other states that are pursuing similar legislation.

The notion of the broader concept of general expense management and the capturing of your dinner receipts and hotel receipts from Excel to software solutions that manage those processes has been a big driver. Millennials, in general, are averse to the notion of having a car at all, >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Craig Powell, CEO of Motus (Part 1)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to Motus as well as yourself.

Craig Powell: I’m the President and CEO of Motus. Motus is a company that serves mobile workers who drive for work. In that, we have the most accurate mobile enterprise solution for fairly and accurately reimbursing employees who drive more than 3,000 miles for work. We’ve been in existence since the early 2000’s and underwent a rebranding in 2013, which was the time I arrived with several other senior leaders.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about how this works. What is the usage model? Architecturally, how is this structured?

Craig Powell: We service both large and small companies that have large distributed sales forces that drive non-specialty vehicles for work. What I mean by non- >>>

5 Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social

Mobile devices, especially smartphones, are growing their footprints at an unprecedented scale. Alongside, the mobile app proliferation is gaining tremendous adoption. At the same time, social media is profoundly changing all aspects of business and social communication. The following industry leaders guide us through the developments in Mobile and Social, as well as offer suggestions for new venture opportunities.

• Rob Chamberlin, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of DataXoom – This conversation highlights how businesses overlay mobile virtual networks on top of wireless carrier networks for specific use cases.
• Christopher Dean, CEO of Swrve – This discussion delves into the depths of what can be tracked and what is being tracked in maximising the impact of mobile apps in industries like travel and hospitality, retail, gaming, etc. It’s a very good view into predictive and analytics-based targeting, real-time actions based on specific business goals, and the related domain. Very interesting conversation!

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Building a Mobile Security Company in Silicon Valley: Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder and President of Appthority (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to us a little bit about your fundraising process? What proof points did you go to raise money with and whom did you raise money from? What was the rational for raising money and what were the circumstances in which you raised money?

Domingo Guerra: We were pretty naive about fundraising. We thought it was going to be very easy. My co-founders and I were all first-time entrepreneurs. In general, you only hear the good stories but no one knows how difficult it actually is. We started fundraising almost by accident. When we didn’t win the grant, we decided to bootstrap on our own savings.

We weren’t paying ourselves. We were just paying for everything with our credit cards and then just living off of our savings. Then in late 2011, we got a call from a VC that wanted to meet with us because they heard about what we >>>

Building a Mobile Security Company in Silicon Valley: Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder and President of Appthority (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Who was the first customer that adopted your solution?

Domingo Guerra: We had a lot of initial beta customers. Automotive companies were doing manual testing of apps, and we were helping them automate that. The first paying customer was one of the largest ad networks. When you play a game, for example, you might see a popup suggesting you to download another game. They wanted to make sure that those games didn’t have malware. It was before we had a user interface.

Now we serve the enterprise directly and we have a portal where they can go to. At that time, we only had our engines. It was very rudimentary. It was basically API access where we would grant the customer a way for them to upload or submit applications. Then our engines would review them and reply with a score >>>

Building a Mobile Security Company in Silicon Valley: Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder and President of Appthority (Part 2)

Domingo Guerra: During my MBA, I decided to focus on entrepreneurship. Santa Clara has a very flexible program and you get to pick a lot of the classes and core competencies that you want to focus on. I decided to shadow a lot of the professors there that had entrepreneurship experience. In the last semester of the program, I got to do a market research project for an entrepreneurship class where you basically write a business plan. That’s when I started evaluating the mobility space inside the enterprise. It was something I was passionate about.

We had all transitioned from the Blackberrys that were assigned to us to the iPhone. However, IT wouldn’t support it. Having a technical background, we figured out how to make it work on our own. It wasn’t necessarily the most secure way for the enterprise if they weren’t involved in that process. A good friend of mine, Kevin Watkins, was at McAfee. I started sharing ideas about mobility and explored starting a company. He was still pretty happy at McAfee, so he didn’t want to leave. >>>

Building a Mobile Security Company in Silicon Valley: Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder and President of Appthority (Part 1)

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

Domingo came into the market at a time when his original value proposition to enterprises wasn’t that urgent. Over time, however, the mobile security challenge has grown into a critical issue, and now the company is thriving.

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

Domingo Guerra: I’m originally from Monterey, Mexico. I didn’t move to the US until I was 18. Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. Monterey is very well-known for some of the largest companies in Mexico. A lot of folks wanted to be soccer players when they grew up, but I wasn’t very good at sports. I wanted to focus on academics and try to do well. I remember a talk when I was a kid where they said, “You need a lot of luck to do well in >>>

Microsoft Acquires LinkedIn for $26.2 Billion: My Analysis

In a singularly brilliant move, Microsoft just announced the acquisition of LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. Two questions are swirling in people’s minds: why, and why did LinkedIn sell?

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