Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: founders

  • Why being a unicorn could be a bad thing

    Why being a unicorn could be a bad thing

    Andrew Wilkinson doesn’t want to be a unicorn. In Why I want to be In-N-Out Burger, not McDonalds, Wilkinson describes how he’d rather his business is a sleek racehorse rather than a beautiful, mythical creature.

    One of the misunderstandings in the current startup mania is the motivation of founders and proprietors; many haven’t gone into business with the aim of flipping the company to a rich sugar daddy for a billion dollars.

    In his great presentation “Fuck You, Pay Me” – essential viewing for anyone starting a business – San Francisco designer Mike Montiero describes “We wanted to pick and choose the clients we were gonna work with and we wanted to be responsible for what we’re putting out in the world.”

    For businesses like Montiero’s and Wilkinson, having a venture capital investor looking over their shoulder would be as bad as working for a corporation; ceding control of your work is exactly the reason they started their businesses in the first place.

    While the Silicon Valley venture capital model is valid for high growth businesses that need capital to scale quickly, most ventures don’t need those sort of large cash injections early in their development – for many, a million dollar cheque from a VC could prove to be a disaster.

    There’s myriad reasons why someone starts a venture and all of them pre-date the current startup mania, it’s why every business is different in its own way.

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  • The business or your sanity

    The business or your sanity

    Yesterday Microsoft confirmed the rumours that it would buy Minecraft developer Mojang for 2.5 billion dollars.

    Following the announcement, Mojang founder Markus Persson — aka Notch — wrote a touching blog post on his leaving the company he founded.

    The business had become too big and the demands of Minecraft’s legion of fans were taking their toll; it was time for Persson to move on to keep his sanity.

    “If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately.”

    For all the hubris we hear from technology company founders and CEOs, it’s those like Persson who probably will end up making the most difference to the world.

     

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  • A unicorn in the wine industry

    A unicorn in the wine industry

    “I was a closet tech guy until the 2000s,” says Vintank’s founder Paul Mabray in describing how digital technologies are changing the wine industry to the Decoding The New Economy YouTube channel.

    We’d spoken to Paul before about the forces changing the wine industry and visiting him in the Napa Valley gives some perspective on the opportunity the sector has in capturing the enthusiastic US wine market.

    Paul’s first venture into wine technology was with Inertia Beverage Group in 2002, “when I started Inertia I said ‘hey, there’s this thing called the internet’”, Mabray recalls. “They said ‘hey Paul you’re so cute, the internet won’t be around in a couple of years.’”

    The internet being a fad turned out not to be the case and Vintank evolved out of the rising importance of social media to industries like wineries.

    “Vintank is the mission control of social media, the one stop engagement platform for the wine industry,” says Paul of his social media listening service which he and co-founder James Jory established in 2009.

    Wine is lagging other industries in adopting social media and other digital technologies because it’s avoided many of the disruptions other sectors have had to deal with.

    “The wine industry is the last industry that hasn’t been changed by the internet,” Mabray says. “If you look at hotels with expedia.com or restaurants with Yelp or Open Table, that hasn’t happened yet.”

    A key facet of Vintank is its use of the freemium business model in offering a basic service for free; a common practice in the consumer (B2C) market but fairly rare in business (B2C) software services.

    “It’s a very different way to do freemium in B2B. Freemium in B2C you do mass adoption — that tiny fraction that pay makes it profitable because so many people have it.”

    “In the B2B freemium model what you have to do is distribute it for free and then you measure the usage; who is using it the most is where you send the sales team in.”

    For Mabray, we’re in early days of using digital media and the wine industry is one of the sectors that needs to adopt the technologies quickly: “The driver for me is this horribly complex problem that needs to be solved — the wine industry needs digital to survive.”

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  • Building a billion dollar start up

    Building a billion dollar start up

    Two years ago we interviewed Mikkel Svane the founder of cloud service provider Zendesk about modern customer support.

    Since we spoke to him Zendesk have had a successful IPO and is now worth over a billion dollars.

    In the latest Decoding the New Economy video interview we catch up with Mikkel and discuss the journey from being a three person startup to a billion dollar listed company.

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  • Spreading the good news – Canva’s Guy Kawasaki

    Spreading the good news – Canva’s Guy Kawasaki

    “My job is to spread good news,” says Guy Kawasaki of his role as Canva’s Chief Evangelist.

    Kawasaki was speaking to Decoding the New Economy about his role in popularising the online design tool which he sees as democratising force in the same way that Apple was to computers and Google to search.

    Democratisation is a theme consistently raised by startups and businesses disrupting existing industries and Kawasaki continues this theme.

    “The world is becoming a meritocracy; it’s not about your pedigree, it’s about your competence,” states Kawasaki.

    Falling barriers to entry

    What excites Kawasaki about the present business climate are the falling barriers to starting a venture. “Things are getting cheaper and cheaper, in technology you had to buy a room full of servers, have IT staff in multiple cities. Today you call Amazon or Rackspace and host it in the sky.”

    “Before you had to buy advertising for a concert, now if you’re adept at using social media – with Google Plus, Facebook,Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram – you have a marketing platform that fast, ubiquitous and cheap.”

    “What excites me is there are going to be more technologies, more products and more services because the barriers are so low.”

    Creating a valued and viable product

    For those businesses starting into this new environment, Kawasaki believes the most important thing a startup should focus on is getting a prototype to market; “at that point you will know you’re truly onto something.”

    “If you build a prototype that works you may never have to write a business plan,” says Kawasaki. “You’d never have to make a Powerpoint, you may never have to raise money as you could probably bootstrap.”

    Kawasaki view is the MVP – Minimum Viable Product – model of lean product development should have another two ‘V’s added for ‘Valuable’ and “Validated’.

    “You can create a product that’s viable, ie you could make money, but is it valuable in that it changes the world?”

    “Is your first product going to validate your vision? If it’s not then why are doing it?”

    The story Kawasaki tells is the tools to deliver valued and viable products are more accessible than ever before; that’s good news for entrepreneurs and consumers but bad for stodgy incumbents.

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