Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Bootstrapping becomes fashionable for startups

    Bootstrapping becomes fashionable for startups

    “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.

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  • Tech’s tightening times

    Tech’s tightening times

    Despite having spent a hundred thousand dollars on a chrome panda for their office lobby, Dropbox are warning staff that benefits are about to tighten, Business Insider reports.

    The warnings from Dropbox’s management are a clear indication that tougher times are approaching for tech companies. For those wanting to imitate the Silicon Valley greater fool model or get a slice of it, that opportunity may have passed.

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  • Rethinking economics in the face of demographics

    Rethinking economics in the face of demographics

    The Western World’s demographic chickens come home to roost. Investor John Mauldin shows nine charts that illustrate the low growth dilemma facing central banks.
    For governments to stimulate economies, they are going to have to find a way to increase productivity and the spending power of populations. The current remedy of pumping cheap money into the economy isn’t enough to do this.
    One concerning message for the tech sector in these figures is that simply boosting productivity will not be enough to boost the economy. In fact widespread automation of existing jobs may make the problem exponentially worse.
    The statistic that indicates younger workers are dropping out of the workforce to look after older relatives should be particularly worrying for economists and a warning to politicians that thirty years of the neo-Liberal model espousing smaller governments and reduced public services now threatens to change the political dynamic – something that the rise of Donald Trump is also a symptom of.
    For policymakers, the question is how to employ people in jobs that give them enough income to support their families without ringing up huge debts.
    Interestingly, much of the current tech mania is based upon the same credit based consumerism that’s driven the last thirty years of western economic growth. Apps like Uber, AirBnB and the countless delivery apps are good examples of businesses based on happy consumers jamming more on their credit cards.
    The era of 1980s thinking is over, we’re going to have to rethink what policies encourage employment and wealth creation along with seriously considering what capitalism is going to look like in the mid-21st Century.

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  • Do it now

    Do it now

    I’ve spent much of today, interviewing Australian tech company founders on why they moved to San Francisco for a project I’m doing.

    One question I’m asking is what advice they would give others planning a similar move.

    Every response so far has been, “do it now. Don’t wait.”

    So what are you waiting to do?

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  • Retreat from the cloud

    Retreat from the cloud

    Despite the benefits, there’s a number of risks of having your data or applications hosted on cloud services. The three most important are costs, availability and portability.

    Having spent the last three days at EMC World in Las Vegas, the cost factor in public cloud services is clear for larger enterprises and many companies – including the soon to be merged EMC and Dell – are basing their business plans on corporations and government agencies bringing at least some of their IT function back in-house.

    Smaller companies too are at risk from high costs as a myriad of cloud services can quickly become a big drain on a small business’ finances.

    Availability has long been a problem with cloud services as they are at the mercy of internet access and, more importantly, subject to the whims of companies’ policies. Two good examples being Amazon’s arbitrary deleting of users’ kindle licenses and Google’s Real Names debacle.

    In the last two days another version of this has arisen where a musician found Apple Music had deleted his collections, while there are claims this ‘bug’ this may be due to clumsy user interfaces it shows the risks in entrusting key data to the cloud.

    Which leads us to the most critical point with cloud services – portability. Many online businesses are working on the basis of locking customers into their services.

    Most founders asset they want to lock customers in by offering the best services but it’s not hard to see as these companies grow, the urge to use proprietary formats or convoluted exporting tools to keep clients on the platform becomes stronger.

    Cloud services aren’t going away but all of us are going to have to take precautions and understand the risk. And backup locally as often as possible.

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