Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Pivoting the business of speakers

Changing the speaker industry requires collaboration and innovation but it doesn’t come without cost as Sonos finds

Today I had the opportunity to tour the Santa Barbara headquarters of smart speaker manufacturer Sonos. I’ll be writing up a some more detailed accounts of some of the interesting things this fascinating company does.

One thing particularly interesting thing about Sonos is how it was established by four veterans of the original dot com era who had no experience in audio hardware or technology but had a vision of how they would like the stereo system of the future to look like.

That vision hasn’t come without change for the company, the shift to streaming has meant Sonos itself has had to pivot away from its original business model which entailed layoffs for the fast growing company last year.

How Sonos is navigating that shift, along with fostering a culture of openness and innovation is an interesting story that I’ll be telling over the next few weeks. In the meantime, my head is spinning from information overload.

Rethinking cancer research

Can business software reorganise the way cancer is studied? Netsuite founder Evan Goldberg thinks so.

Netsuite founder Evan Goldberg hopes the lessons he’s learned from building a software company can help researchers find new ways to treat cancers.

When Netsuite founder Evan Goldberg was contacted by his birth mother it was not all good news, she revealed to him she had one of the BRAC genetic markers, an hereditary trait that indicates a high risk of breast cancer.

A day before the official launch of the BRAC Foundation he has founded with a ten million dollar donation, Goldberg spoke to Decoding the New Economy at the Suiteworld conference in San Jose about how he believes he can help improve the treatement of cancers.

“How I think I can make a difference is applying some of the things we’ve learned at Netsuite,” he explained. “Netsuite has been all about breaking down silos, it’s not a system to run a department, it’s to run a business.”

“Much research and money is focused on a particular type of cancer – breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer but it turns out from what we’ve learned from genetic research that cancers can be more similar to each other across different cancer types than to those in the same organs.”

“So in the same way we’re trying to break down silos between parts of a business, trying to break down silos between researchers, different institutions has sort of been a theme of mine.”

“What’s really interesting this notion of looking at where the cancer started, which is what we’ve been doing for a hundred years, looking at what is the mechanism underneath it is kind of how we’ve looked at business at Netsuite.”

“We’re supporting research in the BRCA Foundation from numerous different institutions and researchers that are looking at all different types of cancer. So bringing them together and cutting through all sorts of silos, these sort of artificial silos – some of which still have value in some ways – but fostering collaboration where there wasn’t any before.”

“It’s not a perfect analogy,” Goldberg admits, “but I do think that this notion of looking at cancer across different dimensions is similar to how we’ve been looking at business.”

“It’s a totally different world, the world of medics, research institutions, hospitals and clinicians, it’s a very different world to the businesses I’m used to deal with. Although there are still similarities in the motivations and the barriers to success.”

One has to hope BRAC Foundation will be successful however Goldberg is the first to admit the bulk of the work lies with the scientists. “The real hard work is done by the researchers,” he says. “Hopefully we can help them.”

The benefits of being public

Both the public cloud and a publicly listed company are good things for a business says Netsuite’s Zac Nelson.

“Managing a public company is a great discipline and in some ways gives us an advantage over non-public company who don’t have to have discipline and make good investments,” says Zac Nelson, the CEO of Netsuite.

Nelson was talking to Decoding the New Economy yesterday at the annual Suiteworld conference, Netsuite’s annual gathering in San Jose.

The CEO’s comments are in contrast to a common view that being publicly listed company distracts a company’s management from focusing on long term objectives, a sentiment Nelson rejects.

“In terms of managing a public company I think it’s an important discipline, I think a lot of people are opposed to these SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) rules but when I look at these rules I think they are just common sense. Are you managing your business right? You want to have control of your business so you aren’t blindsided.”

Probably the biggest advocate of taking companies private is Michael Dell who took his eponymous business off the markets three years ago and is now looking at doing the same thing with EMC in what will be the biggest IT merger in history.

Dell going private

Nelson doesn’t think Dell going private was a mistake though, “I saw Larry Ellison say it was one of the greatest business moves in the history of man, I’ll agree with Larry – he’s usually right on that stuff,” he laughed.

“The thing I see Dell doing that I understand is they are giving their smaller division more autonomy. Dell Boomi is going back to being just Boomi and Secureworks just went public. Certainly from a structural standpoint and business model innovation that makes sense and it’s what I understand.”

As a public company, Netsuite does come under scrutiny and one of the criticisms is that it continues to post losses, something that Nelson puts down to the treatment of stock options. In the last earnings report, the company claimed capitalising stock options added $30 million in costs and not including them would see the company reporting an eight million dollar profit last quarter.

“We’re cash flow positive, we generate over $140 million in cash,” Nelson says. “People are happy with it, we’re still investing. What we’re investing in this year is different to the past, we’re investing in services to enable our customers to invest in product.”

Integrating the stack

One of the advantages Nelson sees that cloud based companies like his have are integrated systems, “the client server world created this perspective that dis-integrated systems actually work – you have Windows, you have third-party apps – but what really works well are integrated systems.” he says. “Look at the most common system you guys use, called Apple, it’s an integrated end-to-end system. Same with Amazon, that’s what we’ve built.”

“The detour we took in the client-server world is still being taken in the software world, a lot of software people believe you can compile this stuff and it will magically work. No, it doesn’t. Integrated systems work better.”

Securing the cloud

One area he specifically sees where cloud services have an advantage in being integrated is with security, “a problem that large enterprises have that we to some degree don’t have is we have one system, we have five data centers. You look at some of these large enterprises and some of them don’t even know where some of their data centres are. How on earth do you secure that environment? It’s not a product problem, it’s a process and IT management problem.”

Nelson’s comments on security are a swipe at competitors like SAP and Oracle who are often criticised for having disparate systems.

With Suiteworld moving to Las Vegas next year, it will be interesting to see who’s taking bets against cloud services like Netsuite. Certainly with salesmen like Zac Nelson, they’re able to tell a good story. The key though is to show some profits in the longer run.

Paul travelled to Suiteworld in San Jose as a guest of Netsuite.

Invite only collaboration

Can a council of wise men build a new Silicon Valley? TechSydney believes it can.

The success of Silicon Valley is partly based on the sharing of information. Can a closed group of business leaders replicate that success?

Currently I’m in the United States interviewing Australian startup founders who’ve moved to the Bay Area on why they’ve chosen to move their businesses in Silicon Valley.

Naturally there’s a whole range of reasons for relocating across the Pacific – for some most of their market was in the US, for others it was the accessibility of investors while for many the move was always part of their plan to go global.

A place you fall in love with

The almost unanimous comment though from the founders was one of the attractions of the Bay Area are the support networks, “It’s a place you fall in love with straight away – it’s the people and the attitude,” says Holly Cardew. “People ask what can I help you with.”

Cardew, the founder of image management service PixC, sums up the consensus on the Bay Area business culture of ‘paying it forward’. Almost every entrepreneur who’d moved to San Francisco mentioned how the question “how can I help you?” was key to building a network and finding customers, staff and investors.

That openness to helping the ecosystem was greatly appreciated by Carl Hartmann, co-founder of logistics startup Temando. “I’m here today because people were kind enough to pay it forward,” he states.

Since then Harmann has become one of the ‘go-to guys’ for Australian entrepreneurs arriving in San Francisco and almost everyone we spoke to mentioned Carl as being a great help for them in obtaining initial introductions.

Building a community

Those introductions and helpful acts are essential in a community where the most valuable asset is the people, not just investors but the entire complex ecosystem of coders, lawyers, publicists, designers and various other disciplines essential for an industrial hub to thrive.

Which raises the question about yesterday’s announcement of the TechSydney initiative, a project claiming “to address the Sydney innovation ecosystem’s greatest challenge: collaboration.”

This is a good idea, and one this writer was involved in seven years ago with the failed Digital Sydney program in 2010 which aimed to bring together the disparate groups that make up Australia’s disparate tech and digital media sectors.

Government failures

Digital Sydney failed because the state government is poor executing at such initiatives so the fact TechSydney is being led by experienced startup founders, investors and advisors should give hope this attempt would be more successful.

However, TechSydney’s press release quickly dispels that hope with the opening line.

Australia’s most successful startups and global tech giants, including Atlassian, Airbnb and Airtree Ventures are backing a new not-for-profit aimed at turning Sydney into Australia’s Silicon Valley.

The “Australian Silicon Valley” line shows a focus on the current Bay Area tech startup model funded by venture capital and seed investors who are happy to forgoe profits in the hope of big capital gain when the business is acquired or goes public – the Silicon Valley Greater Fool model.

Silicon Valley itself is pivoting away from this model with businesses across the Bay Area now frantic to at least have the illusion of being profitable or on the path to making money. In narrowly promoting the tech startup model TechSydney seems to be trying to catch a wave that has already broken.

Slamming the door

The main worry from the TechSydney announcement though is that it seems to go against the open door policy that makes Silicon Valley so successful. Rather than encouraging questions and new entrants, TechSydney is slamming the door shut with only the successful and well connected invited.

The group will launch at an exclusive invitation-only Dinner on May 30 at the Powerhouse. Sydney’s top 200 technology companies will be in attendance. The first 100 have already been invited, and the group is now taking applications for the next 100 attendees at TechSydney.com.au, and is urging companies to register their interest today.

In some respects this is to be expected of the Sydney business community – the city’s industry is based upon the Rum Corps model of the colony’s early days where success is based upon connections and influence rather than being open and collaborative. This attitude underpins the ‘mates culture’ that is critical to acquiring power and wealth in New South Wales and across Australia.

With an attitude of having an ‘invite only’ group leading the push the hopes of creating an ‘Australian Silicon Valley’ are doomed. By locking out new entrants or dissenting thinkers, it’s impossible to create a vibrant hub.

Creating an open mindset

For Sydney, or any other Australian city, to succeed as a global hub in any industry that legacy of the Rum Corps, the mates network, needs to be suppressed and a more open, collaborative mindset put in place.

TechSydney can do that if its leaders choose to do so. Hopefully at their invite only meeting at the end of the month the wise men of Sydney’s tech elite will decide that an open initiative that welcomes newcomers and tolerates new ideas is the best opportunity to make the city a global leader.

Equity crowdfunding arrives late to the party

Equity crowdsourcing comes late to the Silicon Valley party but could it help the capital starved small business sector?

As of today, equity crowdfunding is now legal in the United States.

The interesting thing is it appears Silicon Valley is shifting away from the VC model that this initiative was intended to promote among smaller investors.

Whether equity crowdfunding can be applied to ventures outside the tech startup industry remains to be seen, it may be in a world where banks have stepped away from their traditional role of providing capital to business that this is the way for proprietors to raise essential funds.

A constancy of change

One constant about the technology sector is change, and a visit to Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum emphasises just how much the industry has changed over the years.

Notable are all the gone and forgotten brands that were in their day giants of the industry along with the efforts by various countries, Britain in particular, to compete with the US in computing.

But most striking are the old roles that rose and fell as technology evolved over the past century, from the Morse Code operators whose skills were essential for safe shipping and telegraph communications through to punch card operators and the ‘tape apes’ of the 1980s.

Most of those roles rose, became lucrative and then disappeared as technology evolved, just as the loom weavers’ jobs did in the eighteenth century.

Like the loom weavers and the companies that employed them, history and technology overtook them. Something that today’s business giants and high paid occupations need to keep in mind.

No industry is static and few jobs are safe in today’s rapidly changing world. It’s why we need to be making the investments in the skills and technologies that will define the future economy.

We can’t assume today’s jobs will be those of tomorrow.

The rise and fall of a social media influencer

The story of one Tumblr influencer illustrates much that is wrong with the social media industry.

Jess Miller from suburban Melbourne was a social media star. Two years ago at the age of sixteen she was earning $10,000 a week as ‘Pizza’ on Tumblr.

Miller was a classic social media influencer, with 700 thousand young followers she was popular with advertisers then along came the payday of reposting fake diet pill testimonials.

Miller started to make serious money. She’d already been able to make a little cash: fashion companies and some small Etsy stores paid her to post pictures of clothing on her blog, with a nudge to her followers to check out their sales. She’d earned about $4000 in this way.

But then the big one came along. Two 18-year-old American social media entrepreneurs, Zach Lilley and Jeremy Greenfield – fans and friends of Pizza – approached Jess Miller and other top-performing Tumblr bloggers in April 2014 with a proposition for a money-making scheme. It used a decidedly old-school lure: diet pills.

Lilley, Greenfield and their associate Dennis Hegstad ran a website called Exposely, which connected brands to people with strong followings on social media. Lilley and Greenfield used their social media skills to create diet pill ads that masqueraded as Tumblr posts, essentially fake testimonials from women talking about their weight-loss journey. Miller would re-blog these posts, and get a small payment if the user clicked on the link. If the user bought the pills, Miller would get $23 and Exposely would get $26. She watched the money roll in – to her mother’s PayPal account.

Eventually the breaches their terms of service, not to mention ethics, became too much for Tumblr’s management and they deleted Miller’s blog along with a group of others in the scheme.

Miller’s story illustrates the manipulation that is a big part of the social media influencer industry with behaviour that’s almost certainly illegal and most definitely unethical. It also illustrates the risks of basing an income or business on service where you can be closed down any time.

For Miller, she seems relieved her time of fame is over. Those building their businesses around these platforms may not be so philosophical.

Industries of the future on display

Today’s startups indicate the future shape of the economy, but where will the jobs come from?

One of the challenges we face in looking at the economy’s future is going lies in identifying what tomorrow’s industries will be.

I’ve spent the day at the 500Startups pitch day at the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley listening to the startups on the program making their investment spiels and in many ways those businesses are a glimpse of the future economy.

While not all of these businesses will survive, and many will pivot over time, they do indicate directions the economy is taking.

The question though is what sectors will drive jobs growth over the next quarter century and whether those industries will pay enough for workers and their families to survive, let alone keep a consumerist economy ticking along.

How cloud computing is making innovation a commodity

Cloud computing services make innovation a commodity says Xero’s Rod Drury but there is a risk in giving AWS a monopoly

Being on the public cloud is a competitive advantage believes Xero CEO Rod Drury.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been writing a lot about cloud computing. One of the themes being pushed by many incumbent IT companies – such as Dell and EMC recently at their Las Vegas conference – is that a hybrid model of computing is developing where certain functions are given to public cloud providers while others are bought back in house.

Rod Drury, the CEO and founder of Xero, has been one of the greatest critics of this ‘hybrid’ model of computing and during an interview with him yesterday I asked him about this view that companies are bring IT services back in house.

“I completely disagree with that,” says Drury. “We’ve been on a two year journey moving from our own hosted environment to AWS. The reason for that is important.”

“We have a trillion dollars worth of transactions for the last twelve months sitting on our servers, the next stage is to apply some of the Big Data, machine learning and artificial intelligence type services. If you’re sitting there with your own private cloud, you have to invest in those technologies.”

“The benefit of being on the Amazon cloud – and this is part of the big battle between Amazon, Microsoft and Google – is you really have to be on that platform to take advantage of the commodity innovation that is in those platforms.”

“Our understanding is our incumbent competitors are still working on migrating their desktop platforms and their own data centres to cloud and haven’t made that investment where they get access to the next generation of technology.”

“So we think we’ve built a sustainable competitive advantage by being on AWS, we see Salesforce have announced they are getting on AWS, and you really have get in there because of what’s happening.”

That’s a clear view from Rod Drury and one that most ‘cloud native’ businesses will endorse. Despite the risks of vendor lock-in, companies like Xero are choosing the cloud vendors because of the access to tools and services.

For Amazon’s competitors, from the small services to the major providers such as Microsoft Azure and Google, the challenge is going to be developing and offering services that can compete with AWS.

In many respects the cloud computing world is beginning to resemble the desktop marketplace 25 years ago where Microsoft dominated and controlled the sector. Whether Amazon dominating today is in the interests of today’s cloud native companies remains to be seen, certainly though Xero’s Rod Drury seems to be happy about it.

Drury’s point though about innovation as a commodity is important though and key for businesses like his that have to adapt to changing markets quickly. Maybe that increased flexibility is the key tradeoff when dealing with the AWS juggernaut.

Diversity and startup success

One investment company believes they have found four factors that predict the success of a startup business – being in Silicon Valley isn’t one of them.

There are four factors that seem to be key to the success of startup business and one that doesn’t reports the Harvard Business Review.

A survey of six hundred investments over the past decade by First Round Capital found the best predictors for success were that at least one of the founding team was a woman, one had been to an elite university, some had worked at a top tech firm and the average age of the team was under 42.

Interestingly First Round’s successful investments weren’t dependent upon the businesses being based in the Bay Area or New York.

Those factors may have something to do with the focus of First Capital’s investment managers but the results are food for thought.

A lack of systems, process or even a working website

AirBnB had almost no working technology when it launched in 2007. But they proved their idea.

The first ever guest of AirBnB tells his story. At the time the site had no contact details and Amol Surve was desperate to attend the San Francisco’s Industrial Design Conference in 2007.

He tracked down AirBnB co-founder Joe Gebbia to get the air mattress and the business was born.

Which shows a good business idea doesn’t need all their processes and technology in order to prove it works. Something that anyone with a new business idea should consider.

Bootstrapping becomes fashionable for startups

As VC money becomes scarce for startups, bootstrapped businesses could come into their own

“The sincerest form of flattery is that customers will pay,” says Alex Bard, the San Francisco based CEO of Campaign Monitor, an email marketing platform originally out of Australia.

Two years ago we spoke to Bard who at the time was Salesforce’s Vice President for Service Cloud and Desk.com. Since then he left the cloud CRM giant to run the global of expansion of Campaign Monitor. We caught up with him again today at the company’s San Francisco offices.

Campaign Monitor is an interesting company in that unlike most tech startups it has been cashflow positive from its early days and when it did take investor money, half the funds were raised from private equity rather than venture capital funds.

“Because the financing climate in Australia wasn’t as fertile here in the United States – and San Francisco specifically – until recently, you have a whole crop of tech companies that have been built differently. From day one they’ve been focused on economics and business fundamentals.”

Bard sees this focus on bootstrapping and cashflow as being an advantage in the current funding climate where suddenly unlimited amounts of VC money can no longer be assumed.

It could turn out more conservative companies are better fixed to weather the coming investment drought than today’s unicorns.