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Month: August 2017

Building a Live Social Network with Houseparty Co-Founders Ben Rubin and Sima Sistani | Greymatter

by Greylock Partners
This post is by Greylock Partners from Greymatter

The rise of social network giants Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn paved the way for the world to connect online and showed the power of people sharing their own ideas, thoughts and images. Today, people share their personal moments billions of times a day yet these platforms are still largely considered asynchronous, meaning you post to your followers and they interact later. The advancement in mobile communication technology has, in many ways, detached the human aspect of communication with the ease and speed of text, “likes” and shares replacing phone calls.    Live group video chat app Houseparty is on a mission to reconnect people in the most human way possible, when they are physically apart. Founders, Ben Rubin and Sima Sistani, have been through the trenches together pivoting from live video app Meerkat to Houseparty. Houseparty is now winning over Generation Z, with more than 1 million daily active users connecting with friends and family through spontaneous togetherness.    The co-founders have deep knowledge of what drives mobile social apps. Previously, Sima was Head of Media at Tumblr responsible for global media strategy and partnership. Ben is a serial entrepreneur who has worked abroad in Israel scaling startup companies and working with large corporations including Intel. In this episode of Greymatter, the Houseparty founders share learning lessons from pivoting a company, the challenges of adopting live video and the opportunity to rethink what it means to communicate online.

Building a Live Social Network with Houseparty Co-Founders Ben Rubin and Sima Sistani | Greymatter

by Greylock Partners
This post is by Greylock Partners from Greymatter

The rise of social network giants Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn paved the way for the world to connect online and showed the power of people sharing their own ideas, thoughts and images. Today, people share their personal moments billions of times a day yet these platforms are still largely considered asynchronous, meaning you post to your followers and they interact later. The advancement in mobile communication technology has, in many ways, detached the human aspect of communication with the ease and speed of text, “likes” and shares replacing phone calls.    Live group video chat app Houseparty is on a mission to reconnect people in the most human way possible, when they are physically apart. Founders, Ben Rubin and Sima Sistani, have been through the trenches together pivoting from live video app Meerkat to Houseparty. Houseparty is now winning over Generation Z, with more than 1 million daily active users connecting with friends and family through spontaneous togetherness.    The co-founders have deep knowledge of what drives mobile social apps. Previously, Sima was Head of Media at Tumblr responsible for global media strategy and partnership. Ben is a serial entrepreneur who has worked abroad in Israel scaling startup companies and working with large corporations including Intel. In this episode of Greymatter, the Houseparty founders share learning lessons from pivoting a company, the challenges of adopting live video and the opportunity to rethink what it means to communicate online.

140. Navigating the Future of IoT (Panel Discussion)

by Nick Moran

UILabs recently hosted a panel of IoT experts to discuss the future roadmap for IoT.  I moderated the discussion and the panel included: Ben Forgan, CEO of Hologram Brenna Berman, Executive Director of City Digital, UI Labs Jenny Fielding, Managing Director, Techstars IoT Jim Gagnard, CEO of SmartSignal (acquired by... GE). 

 

To listen more, please visit http://fullratchet.net/podcast-episodes/ for all of our other episodes.

Also, follow us on twitter  for updates and more information.

Investor Stories 66: Why I Passed (Mougayar, Mohnot, Cowan)

by Nick Moran

On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following investors are featured:

- William Mougayar

- Sheel Mohnot

- David Cowan

Each investor highlights a situation where they decided not to invest, why they passed, and how it played out.        

 

To listen more, please visit http://fullratchet.net/podcast-episodes/ for all of our other episodes.

Also, follow us on twitter  for updates and more information.

Driving Fast Growth in B2B Companies with Casey Winters and Naomi Ionita | Greymatter

by Greylock Partners
This post is by Greylock Partners from Greymatter

Historically, there has been a clear divide of how to grow a B2B company and a consumer business. However, in the past 5 years, we have seen B2B companies shift from the traditional sales growth practice to techniques used by consumer startups, such as product driven growth initiatives, distribution through mobile App stores, free trials and lower price plans. Today’s leading companies like Atlassian and Twilio reached IPO levels without a traditional sales-specific approach and startups like Dropbox and Slack use growth tactics pulled right out of a consumer-oriented playbook. In this episode of Greymatter, Invoice2go VP of Growth Naomi Ionita and Greylock Growth Advisor in Residence Casey Winters discuss their experience with growth retention and monetization at B2B companies. They share insight on monetizing your product, best practices for converting your freemium users to paying customers and advice for preventing customer churn.    Both have a deep understanding of what drives user retention and paid conversion. Prior to Invoice2go, Naomi worked in mobile product management at Evernote where she founded and built the Growth team. Casey led acquisition efforts at Pinterest and ran marketing for Grubhub, where he helped the company grow from 30,000 users to over 3 million.

Driving Fast Growth in B2B Companies with Casey Winters and Naomi Ionita | Greymatter

by Greylock Partners
This post is by Greylock Partners from Greymatter

Historically, there has been a clear divide of how to grow a B2B company and a consumer business. However, in the past 5 years, we have seen B2B companies shift from the traditional sales growth practice to techniques used by consumer startups, such as product driven growth initiatives, distribution through mobile App stores, free trials and lower price plans. Today’s leading companies like Atlassian and Twilio reached IPO levels without a traditional sales-specific approach and startups like Dropbox and Slack use growth tactics pulled right out of a consumer-oriented playbook. In this episode of Greymatter, Invoice2go VP of Growth Naomi Ionita and Greylock Growth Advisor in Residence Casey Winters discuss their experience with growth retention and monetization at B2B companies. They share insight on monetizing your product, best practices for converting your freemium users to paying customers and advice for preventing customer churn.    Both have a deep understanding of what drives user retention and paid conversion. Prior to Invoice2go, Naomi worked in mobile product management at Evernote where she founded and built the Growth team. Casey led acquisition efforts at Pinterest and ran marketing for Grubhub, where he helped the company grow from 30,000 users to over 3 million.

Investor Stories 65: Lessons Learned (Tunguz, Davis, Draper, Eakman)

by Nick Moran

On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following investors are featured:

- Tom Tunguz

- Mark Peter Davis

- Adam Draper

- Lindel Eakman

Each investor illustrates a critical lesson learned about startup investing and how it’s changed their approach.          

 

To listen more, please visit http://fullratchet.net/podcast-episodes/ for all of our other episodes.

Also, follow us on twitter  for updates and more information.

Reinventing Customer Service with Gladly Co-Founders Joseph Ansanelli and Michael Wolfe | Greymatter

by Greylock Partners
This post is by Greylock Partners from Greymatter

Engaging with customers is one of the most difficult challenges for most companies. With the growing number of ways consumers interact with brands — from phone calls, to texting, to social media messaging — it’s becoming increasingly hard for companies to aggregate interactions into useful information. Even today, customer service products focus on individual communication channels and treat customers as case numbers or tickets. The founders of Gladly think this standard needs to change. They are reimagining the business/consumer relationship by centralizing all communications and making the atomic unit of their product what it should be: the customer.  Gladly CEO Joseph Ansanelli and VP of Engineering Michael Wolfe have a deep history of successful ventures together. The two first worked with each other at Kana, an early customer service software company that helped managed email and web based communications. The pair later founded Vontu, a data loss prevention software that was later acquired by Symantec. In 2015, they got the band back together and incubated Gladly at Greylock with mission to change how large enterprises interact with their many customers.   In the latest episode of Greymatter, Joseph and Michael sit down with Greylock partner and Gladly board member, Jerry Chen. The founders share their vision for reinventing customer service, identifying spaces ripe for disruption, and what it takes to become the industry standard. Below are a few key takeaways from the discussion.

Reinventing Customer Service with Gladly Co-Founders Joseph Ansanelli and Michael Wolfe | Greymatter

by Greylock Partners
This post is by Greylock Partners from Greymatter

Engaging with customers is one of the most difficult challenges for most companies. With the growing number of ways consumers interact with brands — from phone calls, to texting, to social media messaging — it’s becoming increasingly hard for companies to aggregate interactions into useful information. Even today, customer service products focus on individual communication channels and treat customers as case numbers or tickets. The founders of Gladly think this standard needs to change. They are reimagining the business/consumer relationship by centralizing all communications and making the atomic unit of their product what it should be: the customer.  Gladly CEO Joseph Ansanelli and VP of Engineering Michael Wolfe have a deep history of successful ventures together. The two first worked with each other at Kana, an early customer service software company that helped managed email and web based communications. The pair later founded Vontu, a data loss prevention software that was later acquired by Symantec. In 2015, they got the band back together and incubated Gladly at Greylock with mission to change how large enterprises interact with their many customers.   In the latest episode of Greymatter, Joseph and Michael sit down with Greylock partner and Gladly board member, Jerry Chen. The founders share their vision for reinventing customer service, identifying spaces ripe for disruption, and what it takes to become the industry standard. Below are a few key takeaways from the discussion.