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Verified Expert Growth Marketing Agency: NoGood
NoGood CEO Mostafa Elbermawy describes how they evaluate a client’s growth challenges by quoting Zen teacher Hunryu Suzuki: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are only a few.” Rather than deferring to in-house playbooks, NoGood adopts an open mind combined with a methodical, data-driven approach to find untapped growth opportunities for its clients. Learn more about how NoGood came to be and why they’re willing to say no to potential clients.
On NoGood’s approach to growth:
“Our work is methodical. It’s intentional. We have to talk about it. We are very transparent about what we do and it’s completely process oriented. Hacking is a misnomer. Growth is not about clever shortcuts. It has to be sustainable and repeatable, and if it’s not, we won’t do it.”
On NoGood’s proudest accomplishment:
“They helped us launch our business. They are our CMO and our CTO. Would recommend to anyone.” Erica Tsypin, Washington D.C., Co-Founder & COO, Steer
“Our success in jumpstarting Steer’s business is one of our proudest accomplishments this year. Steer is an electric car subscription startup that asked us to increase their activations. Basically, our job was to generate new active members, which not only meant encouraging more users to download the app, upload a license, and get approved, but it also meant delivering a car to a member’s door, having them drive that car and leaving a review. We were able to demonstrate signup traction for Steer and help them launch in under three months.”
Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup growth marketing agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.
Interview with NoGood CEO and Growth Lead Mostafa Elbermawy
Yvonne Leow: To kick things off, how did you get into growth?
Mostafa Elbermawy: Well, I went to school for archaeology, but hieroglyphics weren’t paying the bills, so I taught myself how to code and started a web design studio after college. I started building websites for clients, and they started asking me how to drive more users to their sites to help grow their business.
I started tinkering with growth out of curiosity, and eventually joined the digital experience team at American Express. That job helped me gain some marketing and growth experience, and I ended up falling in love with that part of the job.
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Climate justice and environmental ethics in tech, with Amazon engineer Rajit Iftikhar
Nearly 8,000 Amazon employees, many in prestigious engineering and design roles, have recently signed a petition calling on Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Board of Directors to dramatically shift the giant company’s approach to climate change.
By deploying a kind of corporate social disobedience such as speaking out dramatically at shareholders meetings, and by engaging in a variety of community organizing tactics, the “Amazon Employees for Climate Justice” group has quickly become a leading example of a growing trend in the tech world: tech employees banding together to take strong ethical stances in defiance of their powerful employers.
The public actions taken by these employees and groups have been covered widely by the news media. For my TechCrunch series on the ethics of technology, however, I wanted to better understand what participating actively in this campaign has been like some of the individuals involved.
How are employees in high-pressure jobs balancing their professional roles and responsibilities with being actively, publicly in defiance of their employers on a high-profile issue? How do leaders in these efforts explain the philosophy underlying their ethical stance? And how likely are their ideas to spread throughout Amazon and beyond – perhaps particularly among younger tech workers?
I recently spoke with a handful of the Amazon employees most actively involved in the Employees for Climate Justice campaign, all of whom inspired me– in similar and different ways. Below is the first of two interviews I’ll publish here. This one is with Rajit Iftikhar, a young software engineer from New York who moved to Seattle to work for Amazon after earning his Bachelor’s of Engineering in Computer Science from Cornell in 2016.
Rajit Iftikhar
Rajit struck me as a humble and precociously wise young man who could be a role model — though he seems to have little interest in singling himself out that way — for thousands of other software engineers and technologists at Amazon and beyond.
Greg Epstein: Your personal story has been key to your organizing with Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. Can you start by saying a bit about why?
Rajit Iftikhar: A lot of why I care about climate justice is informed by me having parents from another country that is going to be very adversely affected by [climate change]. Countries like Bangladesh are going to suffer some of the worst consequences from climate change, because of where the country’s located, and the fact that it doesn’t have the resources to adapt.
Bangladesh is already feeling the effects of climate crisis; it is much harder for people to live in the rural areas, [people are] being forced into the cities. Then you have the cyclones that the climate crisis is going to bring, and rising sea levels and flooding.
So, my background [emphasizes, for me] how unjust our emissions are in causing all these problems for people in other countries. And even for communities of color within our country who are going to be disproportionately impacted by the emissions that largely richer people [cause].
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How to make remote work work
Every time I see a “the future of work is remote” article, I think to myself: “How backwards! How retro! How quaint!” That future is now, for many of us. I’ve been a fully remote developer-turned-CTO for a full decade. So I’m always baffled by people still wrestling with whether remote work is viable for their company. That jury rendered its verdict a long time ago.
One reason companies still struggle with it is that remote work amplifies the negative effects of bad practices. If everyone’s in one place, you can dither, handwave, vacillate, micromanage, and turn your workplace into an endless wasteland of unclear uncertainty, punctuated by ad-hoc last-second crisis meetings — and your employees will probably still conspire against your counterproduction to get something done, albeit much less than what they’re capable of.
If they’re remote, though, progress via conspiracy and adhocracy is no longer an option. If they’re remote, you need decisive confidence, clear direction, iterative targets, independent responsibilities, asynchronous communications, and cheerful chatter. Let me go over each of those:
Decisive confidence. Suppose Vivek in Delhi, Diego in Rio, and Miles in Berlin are all on a project. (An example I’m drawing from my real life.) It’s late your time. You have to make a decision about the direction of their work. If you sleep on it, you’re writing off multiple developer-days of productivity.
Sometimes they have enough responsibilities to have other things to work on. (More on that below.) Sometimes you don’t have to make the decision because they have enough responsibility to do so themselves. (More on that below.) But sometimes you have to make the business-level decision based on scant information. In cases like this, remember the military maxim: “Any decision is better than no decision.”
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Verified Expert Growth Marketing Agency: Growth Pilots
Growth Pilots is one of the more exclusive performance marketing agencies in San Francisco, but they know how to help high-growth startups excel at paid marketing. CEO and founder Soso Sazesh credits his personal experiences as an entrepreneur along with his team’s deep understanding of high-growth company needs and challenges as to what sets Growth Pilots apart. Whether you’re a founder of a seed or Series D stage startup, learn more about Growth Pilots’ approach to growth and partnerships.
Advice to early-stage founders
“I think a lot of times, especially at the early stage, founders don’t have a lot of time so they’re willing to find the path of least resistance to get their paid acquisition channels up and running. If things are not properly set up and managed, this can lead to a false negative in terms of writing off a channel’s effectiveness or scalability. It’s worth talking to an expert, even if it’s just for advice, to ensure you don’t fall into this trap.”
On Growth Pilots’ operations
“They have good business acumen, move fast and work as an extension to your internal team.” Guillaume McIntyre, SF, Head of Acquisition Marketing, Instacart
“Something we pride ourselves on is working with relatively few clients at a time so we can really focus all of our team’s efforts and energy on doing the highest quality work. Each of our team members works on a maximum of two to three accounts, and therefore they’re able to get very invested in each client’s business and integrated into their team. We really try to simulate the internal team dynamics as much as possible and pairing that with our external capabilities and expertise.”
Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup growth marketing agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.
Interview with Growth Pilots Founder and CEO Soso Sazesh
Yvonne Leow: Tell me a little bit about your background and how you got into growth.
Soso Sazesh: I grew up in northern Minnesota where there is no tech industry whatsoever and then after high school, I came out to Silicon Valley and got exposed to the epicenter of the technology industry. I became very interested in startups and hustled to find startup internships so I could get experience and learn how they operated.
After a couple of startup internships, I got accepted to UC Berkeley and that gave me even more exposure to the startup ecosystem with all of the startup events and resources that UC Berkeley had to offer. I worked on a couple of startup projects while I was at UC Berkeley, and I taught myself scrappy product management and how to get software built using contract developers.
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AI security startup Darktrace’s CEO defeats buzzword bingo with trust and transparency
It takes a lot of trust to allow a company to come in and install a mystery box on their network to monitor for threats. It’s like inviting in a security guard to sit in your living room to make sure nobody breaks in.
Yet that’s exactly what Darktrace does. (The box, not the security guard.)
The Cambridge U.K.-founded company, now with a second headquarters in San Francisco, assumes that any network can be breached. Instead of looking at the perimeter of a network, Darktrace uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to scan and identify security weaknesses and malicious traffic inside a company’s network.
Traditional network monitoring typically uses signature-based threat detection of matching against known malicious files, but can be easily modified to evade detection. Instead, Darktrace builds up a profile of the network to understand what the baseline “normal” looks like so it can spot and identify potential issues, like large amounts of data exfiltration or suspect devices.
But how do you win over those who see a sea of meaningless buzzwords? How can you differentiate between the smoke and mirrors and the real deal?
“No one wants the black box making decisions without them knowing what it’s doing,” said Nicole Eagan, Darktrace’s co-founder and chief executive, in a call with TechCrunch.
“So, let them have visibility,” she said.
Darktrace’s founders have roots in the U.K. and U.S. intelligence, where they took what they knew of the cybersecurity threats to the private sector to where the new battleground opened up. In the past half-decade of its existence, the company has gained major clients on its roster — from telcos to banks, tech giants and car makers — supported by 900 staff in over 40 offices around the world.
About a quarter of its customers are in financial services, said Eagan. But it takes a lot for the heavily regulated companies to trust a mystery device on a company’s network where the data and security, like financial services, is highly regulated.
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Maker Faire halts operations and lays off all staff
Financial troubles have forced Maker Media, the company behind crafting publication MAKE: magazine as well as the science and art festival Maker Faire, to lay off its entire staff of 22 and pause all operations. TechCrunch was tipped off to Maker Media’s unfortunate situation which was then confirmed by the company’s founder and CEO Dale Dougherty.
For 15 years, MAKE: guided adults and children through step-by-step do-it-yourself crafting and science projects, and it was central to the maker movement. Since 2006, Maker Faire’s 200 owned and licensed events per year in over 40 countries let attendees wander amidst giant, inspiring art and engineering installations.
“Maker Media Inc ceased operations this week and let go of all of its employees — about 22 employees” Dougherty tells TechCrunch. “I started this 15 years ago and it’s always been a struggle as a business to make this work. Print publishing is not a great business for anybody, but it works…barely. Events are hard . . . there was a drop off in corporate sponsorship.” Microsoft and Autodesk failed to sponsor this year’s flagship Bay Area Maker Faire.
But Dougherty is still desperately trying to resuscitate the company in some capacity, if only to keep MAKE:’s online archive running and continue allowing third-party organizers to license the Maker Faire name to throw affiliated events. Rather than bankruptcy, Maker Media is working through an alternative Assignment for Benefit of Creditors process.
“We’re trying to keep the servers running” Dougherty tells me. “I hope to be able to get control of the assets of the company and restart it. We’re not necessarily going to do everything we did in the past but I’m committed to keeping the print magazine going and the Maker Faire licensing program.” The fate of those hopes will depend on negotiations with banks and financiers over the next few weeks. For now the sites remain online.
The CEO says staffers understood the challenges facing the company following layoffs in 2016, and then at least 8 more employees being let go in March according to the SF Chronicle. They’ve been paid their owed wages and PTO, but did not receive any severance or two-week notice.
“It started as a venture-backed company but we realized it wasn’t a venture-backed opportunity” Dougherty admits, as his company had raised $10 million from Obvious Ventures, Raine Ventures, and Floodgate. “The company wasn’t that interesting to its investors anymore. It was failing as a business but not as a mission. Should it be a non-profit or something like that? Some of our best successes for instance are in education.”
The situation is especially sad because the public was still enthusiastic about Maker Media’s products Dougherty said that despite rain, Maker Faire’s big Bay Area event last week met its ticket sales target. 1.45 million people attended its events in 2016. MAKE: magazine had 125,000 paid subscribers and the company had racked up over one million YouTube subscribers. But high production costs in expensive cities and a proliferation of free DIY project content online had strained Maker Media.
“It works for people but it doesn’t necessarily work as a business today, at least under my oversight” Dougherty concluded. For now the company is stuck in limbo.
Regardless of the outcome of revival efforts, Maker Media has helped inspire a generation of engineers and artists, brought families together around crafting, and given shape to a culture of tinkerers. The memory of its events and weekends spent building will live on as inspiration for tomorrow’s inventors.
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Why identity startup Auth0’s founder still codes: It makes him a better boss
If you ask Eugenio Pace to describe himself, “engineer” would be fairly high on the list.
“Being a CEO is pretty busy,” he told TechCrunch in a call last week. “But I’m an engineer in my heart — I am a problem solver,” he said.
Pace, an Argentinan immigrant to the U.S., founded identity management company Auth0 in 2013 after more than a decade at Microsoft. Auth0, pronounced “auth-zero,” has been described as like Stripe for payments or Twilio for messaging. App developers can add a few lines of code and it immediately gives their users access to the company’s identity management service.
That means the user can securely log in to the app without building a homebrew username and password system that’s invariably going to break. Any enterprise paying for Auth0 can also use its service to securely logon to the company’s internal network.
“Nobody cares about authentication, but everybody needs it,” he said.
Pace said Auth0 works to answer two simple questions. “Who are you, and what can you do?” he said.
“Those two questions are the same regardless of the device, the app, or whether if I’m an employee of somebody or if I am an individual using an app, or if I am using a device where there’s no human attached to it,” he said.
Whoever the users are, the app needs to know if the person using the app or service is allowed to, and what level of access or functionality they can get. “Can you transfer these funds?,” he said. “Can you approve these expense reports? Can you open the door of my house?” he explained.
Pace left Microsoft in 2012 and founded Auth0 during the emergence of Azure, which transformed Microsoft from a software giant into a cloud company. It was at Microsoft where he found identity management was one of the biggest headaches for developers moving their apps to the cloud. He wrote book after book, and edition after edition. “I felt like I could keep writing books about the problem — or I can just solve the problem,” he said.
So he did.
Instead of teaching developers how to become experts in identity management, he wanted to give them the tools to employ a sign-on solution without ever having to read a book.
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Fundraising 101: How to trigger FOMO among VCs
Let’s go beyond the high-level fundraising advice that fills VC blogs. If you have a compelling business and have educated yourself on crafting a pitch deck and getting warm intros to VCs, there are still specific questions about the strategy to follow for your fundraise.
How can you make your round “hot” and trigger a fear of missing out (FOMO) among investors? How can you fundraise faster to reduce the distraction it has on running your business?
“You’re trying to make a market for your equity. In order to make a market you need multiple people lining up at the same time.”
Unsurprisingly, I’ve noticed that experienced founders tend to be more systematic in the tactics they employ to raise capital. So I asked several who have raised tens (or hundreds) of millions in VC funding to share specific strategies for raising money on their terms. Here’s their advice.
(The three high-profile CEOs who agreed to share their specific playbooks requested anonymity so VCs don’t know which is theirs. I’ve nicknamed them Founder A, Founder B, and Founder C.)
Have additional fundraising tactics to share? Email me at eric.peckham@techcrunch.com.
Table of Contents
- You need to create a market for your shares
- The one month fundraise
- Thursday/Friday meetings
- The bicoastal month
- Early relationship building
- Organize your pitch better
- Research each VC’s style
- You’re not just being judged on your startup
- The money is already yours
You need to create a market for your shares
“You’re trying to make a market for your equity. In order to make a market, you need multiple people lining up at the same time.”
That advice from Atrium CEO Justin Kan (a co-founder of companies like Twitch and former partner at Y Combinator) was reiterated by all the entrepreneurs I interviewed. Fundraising should be a sprint, not a marathon, otherwise the loss of momentum will make it more difficult.
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How we scaled our startup by being remote first
Michael Risse
Contributor
Contributor
Michael Risse is VP & chief marketing officer at Seeq, a company building advanced applications for engineers to accelerate insights into process manufacturing data. He was formerly a consultant with big data platform and application companies, and prior to that worked with Microsoft for 20 years.
Startups are often associated with the benefits and toys provided in their offices. Foosball tables! Free food! Dog friendly! But what if the future of startups was less about physical office space and more about remote-first work environments? What if, in fact, the most compelling aspect of a startup work environment is that the employees don’t have to go to one?
A remote-first company model has been Seeq’s strategy since our founding in 2013. We have raised $35 million and grown to more than 100 employees around the globe. Remote-first is clearly working for us and may be the best model for other software companies as well.
So, who is Seeq and what’s been the key to making the remote-first model work for us? And why did we do it in the first place?
Seeq is a remote-first startup – i.e. it was founded with the intention of not having a physical headquarters or offices, and still operates that way – that is developing an advanced analytics application that enables process engineers and subject matter experts in oil & gas, pharmaceuticals, utilities, and other process manufacturing industries to investigate and publish insights from the massive amounts of sensor data they generate and store.
To succeed, we needed to build a team quickly with two skill sets: 1) software development expertise, including machine learning, AI, data visualization, open source, agile development processes, cloud, etc. and 2) deep domain expertise in the industries we target.
Which means there is no one location where we can hire all the employees we need: Silicon Valley for software, Houston for oil & gas, New Jersey for fine chemicals, Seattle for cloud expertise, water utilities across the country, and so forth. But being remote-first has made recruiting and hiring these high-demand roles easier much easier than if we were collocated.
Image via Seeq Corporation
Job postings on remote-specific web sites like FlexJobs, Remote.co and Remote OK typically draw hundreds of applicants in a matter of days. This enables Seeq to hire great employees who might not call Seattle, Houston or Silicon Valley home – and is particularly attractive to employees with location-dependent spouses or employees who simply want to work where they want to live.
But a remote-first strategy and hiring quality employees for the skills you need is not enough: succeeding as a remote-first company requires a plan and execution around the “3 C’s of remote-first”.
The three requirements to remote-first success are the three C’s: communication, commitment and culture.
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Delane Parnell’s plan to conquer amateur esports
Most of the buzz about esports focuses on high-profile professional teams and audiences watching live streams of those professionals.
What gets ignored is the entire base of amateurs wanting to compete in esports below the professional tier. This is like talking about the NBA and the value of its sponsorships and broadcast rights as if that is the entirety of the basketball market in the US.
Los Angeles-based PlayVS (pronounced “play versus”) wants to become the dominant platform for amateur esports, starting at the high school level. The company raised $46 million last year—its first year operating—with the vision that owning the infrastructure for competitions and expanding it to encompass other social elements of gaming can make it the largest gaming company in the world.
I recently sat down with Founder & CEO Delane Parnell to talk about his company’s formation and growth strategy. Below is the transcript of our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Founding PlayVS
Eric P: You have a fascinating background as a serial entrepreneur while you were a teenager.
Delane P.: I grew up on the west side of Detroit and started working at the cell phone store of a family friend when I was 13. When I turned 16 or so, I joined two guys in opening our own Metro PCS franchise. And then two additional franchises. And I was on the founding team of a car rental company called Executive Rental Car.
Eric P: And this segued into tech startups after meeting Jon Triest from Ludlow Ventures?
Delane P: He got me a ticket to the Launch conference in SF, and that experience inspired me to start a Fireside Chat series in Detroit that brought in people like Brian Wong from Kiip and Alexis Ohanian from Reddit to speak. Starting at 21, I worked at a venture capital firm called IncWell based in Birmingham, Michigan then joined a startup called Rocket Fiber.
We were focused on internet infrastructure – this is 2015-ish – and I was appointed to lead our strategy in esports. So I met with many of the publishers, ancillary startups, tournament organizers, and OG players and team owners. Through the process, I became passionate about esports and ended up leaving Rocket Fiber to start a Call of Duty team that I quickly sold to TSM.
Eric P: What then drove you to found PlayVS? Did it seem like an obvious opportunity or did it take you a while to figure it out?
Delane P.: What esports means is playing video games competitively bound to governance and a competitive ruleset. As a player, what that experience means is you play on a team, in a position, with a coach, in a season that culminates in some sort of championship.
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