Why Volition Capital Invested In Connatix
We are thrilled to announce our newest $15 million investment in Connatix, and I am very honored to join Connatix’s Board of Directors. Connatix is performing exceptionally well, and we couldn’t be more excited to partner with them going forward.
So, what does Connatix do?
Quite simply, Connatix enables publishers to generate substantially more revenue from digital video through their industry-leading native video syndication and monetization platform (more on what that means in a bit).
Why does this matter?
It starts with the consumer. You and I are changing how we consume digital content. We are consuming more video every year. Our desire for video content is accelerating and has been for years. We are also consuming that video content predominantly on mobile. In short, we want that video seamlessly, in any and every form factor, rendered perfectly, when we want it. And, we only want quality, unobtrusive content. Our tolerance for any content that looks untrusted is gone. Simple enough, right?
Well, this creates a host of problems for digital publishers who now have to engage consumers with video content to stay relevant. Problem #1: not all publishers have video content and nearly all publishers don’t have enough video content. It’s hard to give consumers something you don’t have. Problem #2: video, especially on mobile, is technically difficult to deliver well. Provisioning, editing, and delivering video content for a myriad of different platforms, file formats, and bandwidth levels is exceptionally hard. Problem #3: many publishers don’t know how to efficiently monetize video. Even if you have video, and even if you can deliver it, if you don’t monetize it well, you’re leaving money on the table. Problem #4: any video content on your site has to be consistent with the look and feel of your site (e.g. “native”) or it will degrade the consumer experience and you will lose engagement, not gain it.
So, how does Connatix solve those problems for publishers?
If a publisher doesn’t have video content – Connatix has a market-leading syndication network where a publisher can selectively publish the highest quality video content from other publishers onto their site. If a publisher doesn’t know how to monetize video well – Connatix has a world-class monetization engine driving consistently superior video economics for their customers. If a publisher doesn’t have video infrastructure technology – Connatix provides a full-stack solution that can be implemented easily and renders all content natively. If a publisher has none of the above – no problem, Connatix’s end-to-end solution can take a publisher with literally no video content, no video monetization, and no video infrastructure and have them up and running in a day generating video revenue. And, even if a publisher already has all of the above, they can still work with Connatix to syndicate their content out to other publishers in Connatix’s network (ranked #2 in scale by Comscore) to generate even more revenue from their existing video assets. As customers like Time, Mashable, AOL, Tribune, CBS and many others have discovered, Connatix’s platform helps all publishers generate more revenue from the insatiable consumer demand for video content.
Why is Connatix such a great fit for Volition?
In all respects, Connatix represents exactly the type of company that we at Volition love. The company is led by a pair of brilliant founders, David Kashak and Oren Stern, who have the ambition to build a game-changing company. Connatix has a crystal clear value proposition for their publisher customers: more revenue. They have a best-in-class product that can be implemented in hours making it a no brainer for publishers. And as a result, the company has experienced significant triple digit top line growth while also having been bootstrapped and profitable since inception. When I first met David and Oren and heard them share the Connatix story, my first thought was – this is a Volition company. We are very excited that today that original thought is now a reality. To all of our friends at Connatix, welcome to the Volition family.
Why Volition Capital Invested In Recycle Track Systems (RTS)
At Volition, we have often talked about how the Internet is changing the workflow for every company in every industry on the planet. For that reason, we have always loved investing in the disruptive companies that are transforming the workflow or supply chain of large existing markets with low technology adoption. That is why we invested in Chewy, which became the disruptive leader in the pet food retailing sector and was ultimately acquired for over $3 billion in what many have hailed as the largest e-commerce acquisition ever. We also invested in Globaltranz, which has become one of the leading technology-enabled freight brokerages and is on its way to $1 billion in annual revenue. Today, we are pleased to announce our newest investment which plays directly into this theme, Recycle Track Systems (RTS).
RTS, based in New York City, is a next-generation, technology-enabled commercial waste hauler – or as they like to say – a garbage company without trucks. The problem that RTS addresses is simple. Let’s say you’re a business that has trash and recycling pick-up needs, so you contract with a waste hauler for that service. Any variety of businesses have this need such as building owners, restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, universities, sports arenas, corporations, hospitals, etc. RTS has great customers across many of these categories. What we’ve come to appreciate is that many of these customers can experience service challenges because the level of technology adoption and data visibility in the waste management industry has lagged behind many other industries.
Practically, what problems arise for these businesses? Pick-ups are missed, which leads to trash being left out, often in violation of city regulations. There’s limited visibility into when trucks are coming for collection, which may require involvement from your facilities team. Despite you separating recycling and composting from traditional waste, your hauler doesn’t actually take this specialized waste to the right facilities – so there’s a lack of accountability. There’s no accurate tracking of recycling and composting to help you reach your stated sustainability goals. It’s hard to order additional pick-up of excess waste, due to the absence of on-demand services. The list goes on and on.
RTS aims to use technology and a deep commitment to service to bring a fundamentally higher-quality offering to its customers in the commercial waste management market. RTS’ model is to truly partner with independent waste haulers by providing them with a hardware/software solution for their trucks to enable better route management, tracking, scheduling and mobile app integration. Haulers within the RTS network then get increased revenue opportunities by being paired with blue chip customers within their region for both recurring and on-demand waste collection needs. RTS’ enterprise customers get greater service levels, transparency, visibility, reliability, accountability, and on-demand mobile capabilities for their waste management needs. It’s a business model where everybody wins.
We couldn’t be more excited to lead an $11.7M Series A financing in RTS, and I am very pleased to join the Board of Directors. We have gotten to know the founders, Greg Lettieri and Adam Pasquale, over the past year, and we have deep respect for their vision, passion, and commitment to service. We are extremely impressed with the quality of customers they have been able to win as a young company in a mature industry. We love the fact that the commercial waste management industry is huge, since any and every business you see has waste collection needs and could be RTS customers. We are also intrigued by the fact that this market has had very low penetration of technology while being one of the most recurring and predictable markets in existence. It is a market that is ripe for a new technology-oriented leader to emerge with a differentiated commitment to high service, and we are proud to partner with RTS to become that next-generation leader in commercial waste management.
The Difference Between Existing Markets and New Markets
Nearly every company pitch I’ve seen covers the topic of market size. And, in every serious internal discussion about a prospective investment, we talk about market size as well. Usually, the primary topic of discussion in both contexts is the size of the market boiled down to an actual dollar figure. Entrepreneurs and investors alike will come up with a very detailed, methodical way, to define the size of the market opportunity. While that’s fine and worth doing, comparatively less time is spent on the topic of whether the market is an existing or a new market – and the associated risks and opportunities related to that. And, the latter topic can be more indicative of the prospects of the investment than the former analysis on market size, itself.
An existing market is a market where customers already spend money buying more or less the same product or service that a given company is selling. That product or service may be delivered or sold in a different way, but at the end of the day, the customer that you’re targeting is already spending money on substantially the same thing. What’s an example of this? Care.com is an online marketplace to find babysitters. People already spend money on babysitters, Care.com is just helping them to find babysitters more easily. This is an existing market. Chewy.com is an e-commerce company for pet food. Their target customers already spend money on pet food. Again, an existing market. Amazon started out selling books, which people already buy. Uber started out replacing taxi services, which people already buy. Globaltranz is an online freight broker for trucking capacity, which companies already buy to ship goods. Square is going after the existing market of credit card processing. Prosper is a peer-to-peer lender, which sounds like a new market, but they’re really selling unsecured consumer loans, which consumers have been procuring for ages. These are all existing markets.
A new market is a market where the end product or service is new – in other words there isn’t really existing demand, but there could be. SpaceX just closed a big financing last week – space travel is a new market for certain. When Google first came out, it was targeting a new market of online search and search engine marketing. There really wasn’t much of an existing market in search at that time, outside of maybe Yahoo and Altavista. Everything related to drones is a new market. Twitter ushered in a new market that had never existed of micro-publishing. Many location-based applications on smart phones (though there are exceptions) are more than likely to be a new market given the technology didn’t exist to do it until the smart phone revolution. Even a lot of the SaaS companies are selling to mid-market companies that never spent money on traditional software applications before therefore making it a new market in practice. New markets abound in the world of venture-backed companies.
When investors and entrepreneurs go after a truly new market – the advantage is usually there are not entrenched competitors so if the market materializes as quickly and dramatically as they hope, market leadership is more attainable. In addition, new markets can grow exceptionally quickly, far faster than existing markets – and a rising tide can lift all boats as the saying goes. So, there is no doubt that you can win and win big in a new market. That being said, the risk one takes with a new market actually emerging is often profoundly underestimated. My guess is the most common reason companies targeting new markets fail is primarily because the market never really emerges at the pace and size that the company and investors expected. You can have great management, a great product, excellent sales and marketing, but if the market isn’t there, then it’s easy for a company to get stuck. It’s hard to have good product/market fit, when there’s no market after all.
When investors and entrepreneurs go after an existing market – the advantage is there’s little or no market risk. You can go into an investment knowing exactly how big the market is, that customers care about the product, that there’s already a product/market fit and customers derive value from what they’re buying. The value of that can’t be overstated. But, the risk of existing markets is there are already companies serving those customers so there is entrenched competition. If existing competitors have substantial customer loyalty or capital, they can be excessively difficult to displace. A new company entering an existing market has to not just be a little bit better, but meaningfully better than existing means of procuring that product to really win. That can be a tall order, but if that competitive distinction exists, there’s a high probability you’re onto a compelling opportunity and success is far more predictable than most companies targeting new markets.
A few companies dominate existing markets while simultaneously opening new markets. A great example of this is Uber. On the one hand, I said that Uber is going after the existing market of taxi services. But, I also said most location-based smart phone apps, which Uber is, are going after new markets. In this example, this is not a contradiction because both are true. Uber started out by displacing the $11B taxi services market. But, why is the company worth $40B? Uber has become so convenient, that they have changed the behavior of how people travel – so they’ve opened a new market as well that may be bigger than the existing taxi market. Certain studies say that Uber’s revenue in the Bay Area is multiples larger than the entire taxi market in the region – which suggests they have both won an existing market and opened up a large new market. That’s a beautiful thing.
So, next time you see a pitch or make a pitch that says the market size is $1 billion – note that not all markets of comparable size are created equal. And, the risks and opportunities of existing and new markets can be substantially different.
Everyone’s 2015 Top Technology Predictions and Trends Lists In One Place
Here are some of the more prominent technology prediction lists for 2015. Not surprising themes: security, IoT/wearables, healthcare IT. Somewhat surprising themes: 3d printing. Missing in action: bitcoin, marketplaces, etc.
Gartner: Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2015
- Computing Everywhere
- Internet of Things
- 3D Printing
- Advanced, Pervasive, and Invisible Analytics
- Context-Rich Systems
- Smart Machines
- Cloud/Client Computing
- Software-Defined Applications and Infrastructure
- Web-Scale IT
- Risk-Based Security and Self-Protection
Business Insider: 14 Tech Trends That Will Make Someone Billions of Dollars Next Year
- Companies will buy massive hacker insurance policies
- Smartwatches will win over fitness bands
- The Apple watch will “dominate”
- Everyday things will get a chip and be accessible from the Internet
- Employees will hang out together online
- Employees will form fitness cults
- Fingerprints will replace passwords
- Charts and graphs will rule
- Hadoop will get even bigger
- 3D printers will grow up
- Cloud computing will become the norm
- Healthcare will become an app
- Digital marketing budgets will explode
- Overall, businesses will spend more on technology than ever
Wall Street Journal: Ten Market Disruptors For 2015
- Financial Services Disruptor: Mobile Technology
- Technology Disruptor: Wearables
- Consumer Discretionary Disruptor: Digitalization
- Energy Disruptor: US Oil Exports
- Industrials Disruptor: Oil Prices
- Consumer Staples Disruptor: Demographics
- Healthcare Disruptor: The Supreme Court
- Materials Disruptor: The Chinese Economy
- Telecom Disruptor: REITs
- Utilities Disruptor: Congressional Action on the EPA
IDC: Top 10 Technology Predictions for 2015
- New technologies will account for 100% of growth in telecom IT
- Wireless data, the largest segment of the telecom sector, will also be the fastest growing
- Phablets will be the mobile growth engine
- New partnerships to redraw cloud computing’s landscape
- Data-as-a-Service will drive new big data supply chains
- The IoT will continue to rapidly expand the traditional IT industry
- Cloud service providers will become the new data center, redrawing the IT landscape
- Rapid expansion of industry-specific digital platforms
- Adoption of new security and printing innovations
- More China, everywhere
IBM: Next Five in Five
- You’ll beam up friends in 3-D
- Batteries will breathe air to power our devices
- You won’t need to be a scientist to save the planet
- Your commute will be personalized
- Computers will help energize your city
IEEE: Top Technology Trends for 2015
- Time is right for wearable devices
- Internet of Anything becoming all-encompassing
- Building security into software design
- The age of software-designed anything (SDx)
- Cloud security and privacy concerns grow
- 3d printing poised for takeoff
- Telling the future with predictive analytics
- Security considerations for embedded computing
- Real growth in augmented reality applications
- Continuous digital health
Mashable: 5 Digital Health Trends You’ll See in 2015
- Wearables for the ear
- Sweat sensor strips
- Smartphone case devices
- Prescription-only apps
- Healthier lighting
My Favorite Value Proposition Is Admittedly Boring
It’s only taken 16 years in the investment business for me to discover my favorite value proposition. And, I admit, it’s a boring selection. First, some context. A value proposition is the value a business offers its customer such that the customer decides to buy that company’s product. To be fair, there are many categories of value props that all have great merit and can be the basis of building a valuable company. So, one is not by definition greater than another. But, we all have our predispositions, and I have a positive predisposition for one value prop in particular. I favor this value prop because, if it is structurally sustainable, it can be equally transformative as it is predictable – and those usually don’t go hand in hand. So, without further ado, my favorite value proposition is offering a customer the opportunity to buy something they already buy, but at a structurally lower price. Yes, if the options are better, faster or cheaper – I like cheaper. Why do I like this value prop? Because there’s little fundamental market risk. If a customer is already buying a product, then you know they want that product and that product benefits them in some way. You know they are ready to buy it now because, well, they already buy it now – so you’re not taking market timing risk. Whether there’s even a market or whether the market is here now is a profoundly underestimated risk undertaken by many emerging technology companies. And, in this example, you meaningfully mitigate those risks. Then you layer on top of a large existing market, a very clear reason to buy with you – you’re selling to them the very thing they already buy, for a lower price. Who doesn’t want that? The key to a company with lower price as its fundamental value prop being a good investment, is their basis for having a lower price must be structurally defensible and sustainable. It can’t be that they’re doing exactly the same thing as their competitors, just charging a lower price. That’s the definition of unsustainable. There is usually some disruption in the supply chain or some technology innovation, which they can take advantage of above and beyond their competitors which is why they’re able to offer sustainably lower prices to their customers and quickly take market share of a large existing market. When I look at our current and historical portfolio, where the ingredients of a structurally sustainable lower price value proposition is true, those companies have an inordinate propensity to be worth $1B+ in enterprise value. Xoom went public last year by offering online global money remittance at a lower price than folks like Western Union because they have an Internet front-end. Prosper offers loans to consumers at a lower interest rate because they use the Internet to cut out the banks who take a margin in the normal lending process. Globaltranz offers businesses access to trucking capacity at a much lower price due to the efficiency of their agent network, technology and buying capacity. Cortera is offering business credit data at a much lower cost than Dun & Bradstreet because of its proprietary data acquisition platform. And Chewy offers pet owners high quality pet food at a lower price than bricks and mortar competitors because they have no bricks and mortar. These companies are all taking significant steps in transforming their respective industries on the core value proposition of lower price. While I can easily fall in love with companies that have other value propositions such as convenience, selection, revenue enhancement, service, etc., lower price is a tried and true value prop which while admittedly boring, can be extremely effective if it’s sustainable.
The 10 Slide Company Pitch Deck
I love meeting with new companies. To me, it’s the oxygen of this business and the most energizing aspect of the job. That being said, the one thing that can take the energy right out of an introductory meeting is the obligatory 20-40 slide company pitch deck that drags on and on. Personally, I prefer a more conversational meeting in which slides are used to launch conversations, rather than claim the entire conversation, about various important topics relevant to the business. Therefore, I thought I’d provide a general framework for a succinct 10-slide pitch deck that should be more than sufficient for an introductory investor meeting. Keep in mind that given Volition is a technology growth equity investor, this is more geared towards companies with some revenue and customers rather than a pure start-up. But, I do think there are principles that are portable across different stages.
The 10 Slide Pitch Deck (in no particular order):
1. The Problem Statement. This is the problem the company solves. What is the problem, why is it such a high priority for whoever has it? Why does this problem have to get solved?
2. How You Solve The Problem. This gets to what the company does. Why do you have unique knowledge of the problem, how do you solve the problem, and why is that a differentiated / defensible approach?
3. The Customer. This gets to who the target customer is specifically. The more detailed and segmented this is, the more credible I find it to be. I’d rather hear, “The chief compliance officer at hedge funds with $100M+ in assets” than “financial services companies”, as an example. Then provide examples of actual customers. How many of those target customers out there actually have the problem you articulated?
4. The Value to the Customer. This gets to the return on investment. How much does the customer have to pay (what is the pricing model), and why is it clearly worth it to them to pay it.
5. Actual Use Cases. Now that you’ve established the problem, solution and value in concept – let’s talk about it in reality. If there’s only one primary use case, given an example of a real customer with a prototypical use case. If there are 2 or 3 common use cases, let’s hear example of all of those.
6. The Product. This can go anywhere in the presentation, but if it’s at this point, I’m probably more than eager to see the product in action. A live demo is always best.
7. Competitive Position. Who else out there is also trying to solve this problem, and why are you better positioned to succeed? Why are you going to win your segment? This is a great chance to talk about win-rates against competition, etc.
8. Financial Overview. A simple slide with historical and projected (to the degree you have them) income statement, balance sheet, and cash flows. A couple of bullets on financing history and ownership breakdown are helpful.
9. Other Key Metrics. This is your opportunity to brag with the actual data that you consider leading indicators for your business. Maybe it’s retention rate, lifetime value/CAC, upsell dynamics, customer or transactional growth, etc.
10. Management Team. Who are the people behind this company? Don’t just put logos of past companies, but titles/roles, companies, and key achievements for each exec at their prior companies. Also worth noting if there are any key hires you want to make.
Every company is different, but hopefully this provides a helpful framework to organize a simple pitch deck. Don’t feel the need to address every sub-question with actual content on the slide. You can always talk to the details during the presentation. Often times, less is more when it comes to slide content.
My suggestion in terms of order is to start with the strongest aspect of the company. If the management team is the strength, lead with it. If the financial performance is the strength, by all means, lead with that. If you’ve got a breakthrough product, start with a demo. But, creating momentum in the meeting right out of the gate is always a good idea.
I’m probably missing something important, but hopefully this is helpful in getting readers pointed in the right direction.
Can Online Privacy Compliance Even Be Implemented? Not Until Now.
It happens every day. You visit a website. Information on your visit is passed to a third party (such as an ad network). That third party uses the data for purposes that is not something you’ve explicitly condoned. For example, go to Zappos and look at your favorite red shoe. Then go about your daily web life – and notice how that red shoe will show up in Zappos ads on other websites unrelated to Zappos. This form of advertising, called re-targeting, happens because Zappos has given information from your site visit to various third parties who then run the ad. But, what if you didn’t want Zappos to give any information on your visit to any retargeter? What if you didn’t want your data given to any third party for any purpose at all?
A myriad of solutions have been proposed to address this problem, but they all revolve around the same fundamental framework. The framework is that your browser communicates to the website you’re visiting whether you consent to being tracked through your data being shared with third parties. And that website complies. Here are some of the competing philosophies:
- Every website has to explicitly ask you what your preference is when you visit it and then lock in that preference for future visits (e.g. certain EU countries).
- You have to proactively opt-out of tracking in your browser settings, otherwise there is implied consent for all websites to track you (e.g. U.S. Do Not Track Legislation).
- The default setting of the browser should turn off tracking (e.g. Microsoft).
While a disproportionate amount of energy has been spent arguing about the merits of these varying philosophies, they are all based on an assumption that is flawed. The flawed assumption is that if a website receives notification from your browser that you don’t want to be tracked – they can actually technically comply with that request. Think for a moment how hard that is. The instant you hit a webpage, your tracking preference is communicated, and somehow that website has to turn off all tracking applications in the website before any of those applications run. It all has to happen in a nanosecond.
To date, there have been two primary approaches to addressing this technically. Both have their flaws.
- Comply, after the fact. This is referred to as “un-pixeling”. The way this works is your browser communicates your tracking preference at the time of your visit, but the website does nothing differently. You are still being tracked. After your visit, though, the website communicates to the various third parties that they shared your data with that you did not want to be tracked – and then they expect that third parties honor that request by deleting your information in their records. The flaw with this approach is it’s not actually compliant at the time of your visit, and there’s no guarantee of compliance after your visit either.
- Centralize all tags. Given that all tracking applications are tag-based, this approach involves putting every tag-based application on a website into a single tag management system (TMS). By having all of the tags in a TMS, the website can then control whether the applications run after receiving your tracking preference information. The flaw with this approach is two-fold. Most websites don’t use a TMS, though I personally expect that to change very quickly. The more important issue is that even in the most comprehensive TMS deployments, it’s never the case that every single tag across a company’s web properties sits in a TMS. So, complete compliance in this model is not realistic.
So, where do we go from here? Are we destined to have all of this debate on Internet privacy philosophies and policies, all the while lacking a realistic means to implement any agreed upon policy? That was the case until recently. Just this week, Volition portfolio company, Ensighten, received a patent on a novel approach to consumer Internet privacy management. It’s finally a practical and easy way to comprehensively comply with your privacy preferences. How does it work?
Ensighten’s privacy management platform is both simple and brilliant. It only requires that a company puts a single line of code in the header of their webpage. It then auto detects all existing and new tags on the page. Then, when you visit a webpage with Ensighten’s privacy service running, it can automatically suppress any and all tag-based applications that require suppression based on your stated preferences and the regulations of your country. Importantly, Ensighten can do this prior to any of these applications running. This solution also does not require the deployment of a tag management system. Simple, comprehensive, and real-time privacy compliance has arrived.
So let the debate rage on. Whatever the final answer is, there will now be a way to act on it.
Why Volition Capital Invested In Ensighten
Following up on my prior post, “What Is Tag Management”, this second post will be specifically about why Volition Capital invested in enterprise tag management leader, Ensighten. Often when we announce a new investment, like we did with Ensighten last week, people ask me why we invested. Hopefully this post will serve to help answer that question. Let me emphasize that for any investment, the management team and the people behind the company is the most important factor. That being said, I will start with some other key factors on why we invested and end with the most important one, the team.
#1: Clear Competitive Separation and Market Leadership
When a new market emerges that we think will be a high growth and strategic market, like tag management, we want to invest in the market leader. While the term “market leader” is easily thrown around in marketing collateral, we use it sparingly when it comes to our investment decisions. Our analysis on whether Ensighten is the market leader in tag management rests on a number of objective measures.
The first sets of measures are financially oriented. Is Ensighten the largest and fastest growing tag management vendor? Yes and yes. We are very confident that Ensighten is the largest independent tag management vendor in the market based on revenue. The revenue difference between Ensighten and the next largest player in the market is quite substantial. We also believe that Ensighten is the fastest growing company in the market in terms of revenue growth. These size and growth characteristics combined suggests that Ensighten is scaling aggressively and expanding its lead over the competition.
A second key measure of leadership is competitive win-rate. When Ensighten goes up against its competitors in a sale process, they win 90%+ of the time. This is an astonishingly high win-rate. After talking to dozens of blue-chip, brand name customers who tested Ensighten against its competitors in proof-of-concepts (POC), we think Ensighten is winning because of superior technology. I will expand on the technology later, but a 90%+ win rate is a clear indicator of competitive separation.
A third important measure of market leadership is customer retention. Ensighten has a near 100% customer retention rate. This means that once Ensighten wins a customer, they almost always keep the customer. This level of retention indicates that the value the customer receives is extremely high. When you combine these attributes: largest company, fastest growing, 90%+ win rate, and near 100% customer retention – we think Ensighten has both established and is extending its leadership position in the tag management market. That’s a great dynamic to invest behind.
#2: High Customer Value – Must-Have Product
We talked to dozens of Ensighten’s blue-chip enterprise customers including Microsoft, Sony, Seagate, Symantec, United, Dell, and many others. Typically, Ensighten’s buyer comes from the marketing organization of these companies. The customers communicated to us, both with their words and their tone, that in no uncertain terms, the value they are receiving from Ensighten is exceptionally high. We think of value as the differential between how much pain the customer experiences from a problem and the delight of the customer when that problem is remediated. On both measures, Ensighten’s customers measured exceptionally high.
In their own words, the key problem marketing organizations have before deploying Ensighten is a fundamental inability to do their job. As I discussed in greater detail in my prior post, “What is Tag Management”, if adding, changing, fixing, or deleting a tag requires dependencies on IT release cycles that can run in intervals of many months – marketing is completely hamstrung. They can’t modify website analytics with ease. They can’t test different ad networks or tailor their website with ease. They can’t deploy and customize important customer centric apps like chat, voice of the customer, and recommendation engines without substantial dependencies on IT. They just can’t do their job. When marketers describe this pain point – it’s very clear in their tone that the problem is debilitating.
On the flipside, when customers describe what life is like after deploying Ensighten’s tag management system (TMS), the joy in their tone is obvious. It was clear to me that the dozens of customers we spoke with were smiling ear-to-ear on the other end of the phone when they talked about Ensighten’s value. That’s rare in customer references. Often times customers will say nice things to be polite to their vendors, but their tone will be more muted. In Ensighten’s case, the customers were raving fans. The reason is that Ensighten’s TMS gave these marketers unprecedented agility and control not to just do their job, but importantly, to do their job well.
#3: World-Class Technology
We spent an extraordinary amount of time evaluating Ensighten’s technology because the tag management space is noisy. Our conclusion is that tag management is one market where the distinction between complexity in servicing basic tag management needs and enterprise-scale tag management needs is dramatic. This market will evolve to be the tale of two worlds. We believe that low-end tag management is a relatively easy technical proposition and will be commoditized quickly. Conversely, we also believe that supporting the complexity and scale of large enterprise tag management deployments is one of the hardest engineering problems we have seen.
From inception, Ensighten has had four philosophical pillars underpinning all technology development. 1. All Ensighten products must be able to be delivered through a single line of code. 2. The platform must support all tag-based applications. 3. The platform must support any device (e.g. PC, smartphone, tablet, kiosk, ATM, etc.). 4. Everything must enhance page performance. First of all, this is an outlandish vision in many respects. Many would have said at the outset that it couldn’t be done. To those who would try, there would have been hundreds, if not thousands, of engineering decisions along the way where it would have been simpler to relax these constraints to get to market more easily and quickly. But, Ensighten pulled together a team with both the technical genius and discipline to architect the solution that stayed true to these principles.
Adherence to these principles is why Ensighten now stands in the position of having the only tag management solution that can truly meet the needs of any and every enterprise-scale customer. This is why Ensighten wins over 90%+ of the time against its competitors. Ensighten’s entire platform was designed from the ground up with rigid adherence to principles that would ultimately prove to be critical to servicing enterprise-scale deployments. After the conclusion of an exhaustive technical diligence process, we sat back and just said, “Wow.” It became clear that Ensighten has a brilliant technical team that cares deeply about their engineering – and the biggest beneficiary of that is their customers.
#4: Large Strategic Market Whose Time Is Now
A year ago, not many people knew much about tag management. We believe that a year from now, tag management will be known as one of the most strategic and important enabling technologies in digital marketing. While Ensighten aims to be the enterprise leader in this market, we believe that thousands of companies large and small will be deploying some form of tag management in the years to come. Large enterprises in particular will have to deploy an enterprise scale tag management system (TMS) like Ensighten just to be competitive. Not having a TMS will soon be an unacceptable position for any enterprise whose web and digital properties are mission critical.
Tag management will become a critical part of web infrastructure as it sits between a company’s digital properties and potentially every third party application that interacts with those properties. This position will be very strategic as the TMS will have potentially unparalleled visibility into the activity and data of a company’s digital properties. Therefore, we expect the tag management market to evolve as quickly and as pervasively as the web analytics market. We anticipate consolidation early in the lifecycle of the market, but also believe there is room for one or two significant independent companies – a position we expect Ensighten to occupy.
#5: Talented and Trustworthy Management Team
Let me finish this post with where my interest in Ensighten all started, the management team. Specifically, I connected with Josh Manion, founder and CEO, the first time in August 2011. He was kind enough to return the cold call of an associate who was in his first month on the job (related post: What Happens After The Associate Cold Call). I met with Josh five times before we seriously engaged in discussions on an investment. Josh is unique – home schooled through high school, chess champion, MIT grad, and grew up in a small town in Wisconsin. The first thing I came to appreciate about Josh is an alignment of values. He’s a nice guy. He’s trustworthy. He’s a grounded and decent person. He’s got old-school values which I respect. The second thing I came to appreciate about Josh is he’s just inordinately smart. The third thing I liked about Josh is he’s deeply competitive and wants to win. Don’t be fooled by him being a nice guy – he wants to dominate.
As I got to know the rest of the management team, I could see Josh’s characteristics throughout the team – off-the-charts intelligence, good people, and fiercely competitive. They also happen to be real domain experts in the field of tag management and passionate about the problem they are solving. At the end of the day, it was our confidence in the team that was the deciding factor on our investment.
So, there you have it – that’s why Volition Capital invested in Ensighten. Needless to say, we’re excited to be involved and honored to be part of the team.
What Is Tag Management?
This week we announced Volition’s newest investment in enterprise tag management leader, Ensighten. I couldn’t be more excited to be involved with the company and to join their Board of Directors. I was sitting down to write a post about why we invested in Ensighten, but after some thought, I realized it would probably be best to first write this post to explain what tag management is for those who don’t live it every day. My next post, therefore, will be about why we invested in Ensighten.
So, what is tag management? Let’s set the stage for the problem.
For many companies, their website is a mission critical part of their business. Hence, to get the most functionality and intelligence from their websites – the webpages themselves interface with many different best-of-breed third party applications. You may not realize it, but when you visit a reasonably sophisticated webpage today, it’s probable that many different third-party applications are loading on that page because of your visit. Some of these applications are visible to you as the end user. Examples of these are ad networks, recommendation engines, video platforms, chat applications, social network plug-ins, re-targeting platforms and feedback engines. Some of these applications are not as visible to you as an end user. Examples of these are web analytics applications, a/b testing platforms, content optimization engines, audience measurement applications, affiliate networks and marketing automation systems.
The way these applications interface with a company’s webpage is typically through a tag. Think of a tag as a little program that is inserted into the html code of that webpage. When the webpage loads, the tag fires, and the application runs. That tag contains the instructions for how that third-party application will operate on that particular webpage for that particular user. For a web analytics platform, it could define what specific parts of the webpage to measure. For an ad network, it could contain instructions on what type of ad unit to run. For a feedback engine, it could set the parameters for what type of feedback module to render. For an a/b testing platform, it could set the algorithms for how different tests will run. Simple enough.
Here’s where it starts to get complicated.
First of all, the tag for a single application can take many different forms. For example, if you want a different ad unit on one webpage versus another, it could necessitate a different tag even if the ad is delivered from the same ad network. If you want the web analytics platform to pull different data from different webpages, which is often the case, that could require different tags. In short, tailoring any application creates many different variants of tags from any single vendor. So, the first complication is there are many different tags, within a single application vendor.
The second complication is that sophisticated websites have lots of different tag-based applications running. In our conversations with Ensighten’s enterprise customers, they may have 10-50 different tag-based applications on any single webpage. The volume of tags is driven by two things. First, companies want best of breed functionality on their websites across all application categories. Secondly, they may be testing different application vendors within each application category. So, that adds even more complexity to the equation.
The third complication is volume. A single website can have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of webpages. If a tag for a single application needs to be placed on every page, that can be hundreds of thousands of tags on hundreds of thousands of webpages for a single application. Not only can companies have websites with lots of webpages, they may in fact have lots of different websites. Many large enterprises have different web properties with distinct domains often in many different geographies. Some enterprises have hundreds, if not thousands, of distinct web properties. That obviously multiplies the volume problem. Then throw on top of all those websites and all of those webpages – tons of web traffic.
Therein lies the complexity: (lots of tags) x (lots of tag-based applications) x (lots of websites) x (lots of webpages) x (lots of traffic) = millions of tags firing every day to users like you and me from a single company’s web properties. And, I won’t even start talking about other platforms like mobile and flash at this point.
That sets the context, now what’s the problem?
The problem occurs when you want to change, delete, add, fix or reconfigure a tag. Think of a typical marketing analytics or optimization organization at a large enterprise. They’re sitting on top of this sea of potentially millions of tags firing every day as users interact with their web properties. Let’s say they need to change a single tag. Maybe they want to run a different ad unit or capture slightly different analytics data. Because that tag sits in the html code of the webpage, marketing must convince IT that the single change should be in the cue of the next release cycle for the website. If they are successful in that, which is an if, then they must wait until the next IT release cycle for the website which could potentially be many months away. Think about that, it could take months to make a single and simple change to one solitary tag.
In reality, large enterprises need to change tags all of the time. Tags can be programmed improperly, so they need to be fixed. The website itself could change which could necessitate a change to a tag. Maybe they were testing an application on part of the website, and now want to roll it out to other parts of the site. Maybe they want to take down an application or deploy a new one. There are reasons why enterprises need to engage with their tags and their tag-based applications in a dynamic way. But the current model of being beholden to the IT release cycle brings marketing agility to a halt.
That’s where Ensighten comes in.
Ensighten turns the entire methodology for managing tags upside down through its Tag Management System (TMS). They start by placing a single line of code in the header of the website:
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”//nexus.ensighten.com/clientID/Bootstrap.js”> </script>
That’s it, one single line of code. That code interfaces with Ensighten’s cloud-based TMS every time a user views a webpage. The magic of Ensighten’s TMS is it enables marketing organizations to manage all of their tags without ever touching the code of the website. That means they can now fix, change, add, delete, and reconfigure any and all tags in Ensighten’s TMS right there in the cloud without ever engaging with IT – and those changes will render on the webpage as if the tag was hard-coded onto the page itself. It bears repeating, Ensighten enables this flexibility for any tag-based application. Enterprises now have ultimate flexibility to try different applications, configure existing ones differently, and remove underperforming applications with complete ease. What could take months, if not years to do, can now be done in a days with Ensighten’s TMS. We talked with many of Ensighten’s blue-chip clients like Microsoft, Sony, Symantec, United, Dell, Seagate and several others – and the feedback was very consistent with this sentiment:
“For me to get a new tag added to the site or change an existing one, it would take 4-5 months. In order to get that tag changed, I would have to go through IT, log a defect, get in a release cycle, fight and claw. I was at the mercy of our bureaucratic IT processes. This is one of the best things we’ve ever done. I can go in and change tags within a day. If I need to add something new, I can add it within a day. It has made my life much easier. I am in control of my own destiny.” – Fortune 500 Ensighten customer.
Hopefully that gives you a window into what tag management is and what Ensighten does. I could go into how Ensighten does it, but that would be a longer post. But, let me just say that what sounds simple required some really brilliant technical minds to come together to create. We think the problem of tag management will be a pervasive problem. We think the tag management market will quickly accelerate to be one of the most prominent sectors of the web because the problem is unavoidable. And, we know that Ensighten has a significant lead in the market. But, I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. Now that you know what tag management is, my next post will be about why we invested in Ensighten.
When Founders Refer To Their Company As “I”
Given Volition’s focus on bootstrapped high growth technology companies, we meet company founders every week that have built amazing companies with very little resources. It never gets old hearing stories of how founders put companies on their backs and will them to survive and succeed.
Yet, in the process of meeting with founders week-in and week-out, I have begun to notice that with some regularity, certain founders refer to their company as “I”. Often, I will hear phrases like, “I will reach $20M of revenue,” or “I will grow 100% next year and hit breakeven,” or “I will have the best technology platform in the market.” On the face of it, it might seem objectionable to refer to the collective efforts of many people in a company with a first person, singular pronoun. Yet, candidly, I don’t entirely begrudge the practice, but it also reflects a company that is still in the process of maturing.
I don’t begrudge it because there was a point in time when the company was quite literally just the founder. If anything was going to get done, the founder was going to do it. Even in the early days of a company where there are other employees, it’s not uncommon to have the founder be the senior person for every functional aspect of the business. The founder is both the head of sales and by default the top salesperson. The founder is the product visionary, product developer, and only QA person. The founder is effectively the chief financial officer and the chief financier of the company. And, of course the founder is the energy and spirit of the company. I don’t begrudge use of the term “I” to refer to the company because for many of these companies, without the founder, there would be no company.
But, it also refers to a company that has some maturing to do. Even if a founder is seemingly indispensable to a company – like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or Sergey Brin – a company must grow to the point where the center of the company isn’t the founder, but the center of the company is in fact the company itself, and its mission for its customers. Ironically, the person best positioned to help drive this transition in a company is the founder.
Some founders adopt a mentality to keep things comfortable for themselves – the strategy, people, and practices of the company stay within the comfort zone of the founder. The founder structurally builds a company where they are at the center and in many ways the company exists not only because of the founder, but to serve the founder as well. Other founders aim to build something bigger than themselves. The company is not defined by their own comfort zone, but by the vision of what the company can achieve. The company exists not for any single individual, but for its greater mission and purpose. The company transitions from an “I” to a “we”. This can be an uncomfortable process for some founders, but often times it’s a necessary one in order for the company to reach its fullest potential.
I have immeasurable respect for founders. Day-in and day-out, I’m rooting for the founders of companies that we invest in and even the founders of companies that we don’t invest in. There are many people that work at a company, but only one founder or founding team. It’s a special and unchangeable position. But, for companies to truly succeed, they can’t just be about the founder. They need to be about something more. And, that’s perhaps a goal all founders can aspire towards.
Thinking About Thinking 
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