1Mby1M Deal Radar 2014: Clickable, San Francisco, CA

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Some technology startup veterans will tell you that when the markets are crashing, it could be a good time to pick up great technologies at rock-bottom prices. SuccessFactors was such a company. It was born out of the dot-com crisis of 2001 when Lars Dalgaard bought some well-funded technology companies that had gone bust and resurrected them with his vision.

After the dot-com crisis, the economic crisis provided another such window of opportunity to Mike Onghai. Inspired by the success story of SuccessFactors, he bought the assets of Clickable in 2013. >>>

Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What you have today is a product and a business model that is just starting to come into the market? This business model is not generating $5 million in revenue?

Benoît l’Archevêque: If you only consider Azzimov, no. But if you consider the whole entity, yes.

Sramana Mitra: You’re basically trying to turn people with major traffic to a Google-kind of business model. It would be interesting to see if they can execute on their side on these ad sales and generating affiliate networks. You’re leaving the execution in their hands. They’re not set up to execute on these kinds of principles. >>>

Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 6)

Benoît l’Archevêque: It’s like the 411 service in North America where people call to get services. In China, they have salesmen receiving the call. People call and say, “I’m looking for this.” The person receiving the call will not only give the information but also go and complete the sale. Azzimov is included in that. They have the affiliate program already in place.

Sramana Mitra: I understand the advertising and lead generation, but how does the affiliate program work?

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Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In the case of Google, they have web self-service advertisement capabilities like Google CPC. If I, as a small business, want to advertise on Google, I can go to Google’s website and set it up to do that advertising. Do you have that in place as well?

Benoît l’Archevêque: Yes. We call that ad boosting. We can do product placement in site. We can actually increase or not, depending on the context of the search. Also, we do product re-targeting. For example, you have a blog. You would like to have contextual products offered in the article you were doing. We can actually place products beside the articles. We call that product re-targeting. >>>

Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 4)

Benoît l’Archevêque: There are three revenue models in Azzimov: advertising when you search, the lead generation system that I just explained, and the affiliate model. When someone buys, there’s a percentage take off that. Put that aside. Take that business model, but apply it to mobile. >>>

Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 3)

Benoît l’Archevêque: I’ll give you a very quick example. If I do a search on Italian, red, and car, you see a Ferrari. What we have created is a new dynamic knowledge graph where we only store words once. If I have 500,000 bottles of wine, I’m not going to store the word wine 500,000 times because I have 500,000 different bottles of wine. I will store wine once. I will store red once. I will store the words that are not common to create this other group of products. We were able to build a new way of structuring data. We can now take homogeneous and heterogeneous data and deconstruct and reconstruct in real time. For us, it’s a matter of seconds.

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Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year was this?

Benoît l’Archevêque: It was in 1990. One Thursday morning, I lost my job. That noon, I said, “Nobody else will fire me again in my life.” So I started my own advertising agency that’s still running. People were coming to me with their problems thinking that only advertising could solve them. I was not just changing the advertising model; I was just changing the business model. If you’re not shouting the right message, you’re not going to get any more result just because you’re doing more advertising. It’s important to have the right business model.

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Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 1)

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We normally only feature companies that have proven concepts in the Entrepreneur Journeys series. This concept, however, is not entirely proven. It is interesting and bold.

Sramana Mitra: Benoit, where are you from? Where were you born and raised? Give us some back story of the Azzimov journey.

Benoît l’Archevêque: It’s a rather peculiar story because I’m a French Canadian. I come from a very low class family from Montreal, Canada. I was actually raised by a plumber and my mother was a Customs Officer – very creative people but not really much into businesses. I was surrounded by people that never really did anything to create a company. They’re not entrepreneurs. I come from a weird place where I didn’t know, at a young age, what an entrepreneur was. The only thing I wanted to do in life was cartoons. I studied Art. >>>