Yaniv Nizan's Personal Blog

Entre and Intra - preneurship by a founder and an Intra-founder

Intrapreneurship is a form of entrepreneurship in which the entrepreneur is innovating within an existing company. Unlike in a startup company where the entrepreneur would raise funding from individuals often called angels or from venture capital firms, intrapreneurs would instead convince the company they are working for to execute on their idea and turn that into an intra-startup.

I had the opportunity to try both types of entrepreneurship, as a co-founder of EyeView I played the entrepreneur role while as the intra-founder of INTENTclick and it's Managing Director I get to play the intrapreneur role as INTENTclick is part of Kontera.

The one challange that people usually associate the most with being an intra-founder is internal politics. There is always a concern that somebody will steal your idea, take credit for it or try to use your success for his benefit. While entrepreneus don't normally have this problem, they do share the same concern that somebody will steal their ideas everytime they try to get feedback or pitch to someone. As explained in one of my former posts - asking to sign NDA - this approach will set you up for a failure. My observation is that there are a lot more good ideas than people who are willing to take the risk and execute on the ideas. The same thing applies to internal entreprenuership. If the idea is big enough to be a stand alone business, the real challange is on the execution. The long road from turning the idea into a reality will require the intra-founder to get as much feedback as he can and convince a lot of stake holders to support him so hiding the idea is not an option. At the same time, the exercise of getting the buy-in of all the stake holders ahead of time will attribute future success to the intrapreneur so no one will be able to steal it from him.

Another big difference I noticed is the organizational culture. With INTENTclick, the culture was partially inherited from Kontera with some influence from founding and management tream while with EyeView, the foudners had a much bigger role in setting the organizational culture. Note that not every corporate or company allows another organization to grow inside of it. As an intra-founder you need to consider what culture you want in your intra-startup and factor that in the decision to innovate from within a given company. 

The other set of challanges with intrapreneurship that is somewhat unique is the constant need for the intra-founder to align it's small boat with the mother ship. Startup companies usually have to do that only after they get acquired by a bigger company and then the merger between the two companies is much sharper and causes the alignment to be quite drastic. In a way the intra-startup is constantly going through the experience of being purchased by the bigger company.

As intrapreneurship is less known, I see it as my mission to get the word out there and make the case for all intra-founders that are building great intra-startups. If you feel you are an intra-founder - you can join the linkedin group.

 

10 Tips for Contacting a Blogger

Here is a post to those of you who have a product for bloggers. Here are the things that we have found to work:

1. Domain tools allows you to research a site - finding historic "whois" records that sometines have the contact information, reverse the IP and see what other sites are owned by the same person and figure out the contact information from there.

2. Leave a comment on the blogger site with a good advice or good feedback on the content. Most bloggers read their comments and will appreciate your contribution to the conversation. 

3. Link to them from your own company or personal blog. Bloggers love links and often monitor who links to them. You want the link to go out of a good interesting post so the blogger will find your ideas interesting.

4. Connect with them in social networks. I have found that most bloggers love to tweet and monitor their 'mentions' (every time . Pay them respect by retweeting, mentioning or responding to their tweets - they are very likely to respond to that.

5. Offer to write something for them or at least give them idea to write on (with an angle). Writing frequently is a hard job and new ideas for interesting and engaging posts are not easy to find. Most bloggers will have a list of ideas and half baked posts to help them survive dry spells. Bloggers love guest posts since it takes away some of the work load. 

6. Try following their tips and recommendations and tell them your feedback. This can be done through any of the methods above.

7. Email them. Once you got the blogger's attention and build a level of relationship, the next step is to email but my recommendation is not to go directly into hard sell mode. Instead, try to refer the blogger to content that might interest him and will build your authority in a domain that relates to your product. If you have an SEO product - refer to SEO content, if you have an infrastructure product - refer to tech elements, etc.

8. Invite him to a conference. Conferences are a great way for bloggers to learn from other bloggers, interact with them and get new writing ideas. One way - is to set up your own event - it can be even a small meetup for drinks at a bar.  Another way is to sponsor an event and hand out free passes or if you are on budget even recommending a good blogging event early on will help the blogger save with early bird discounts and will win you points.

9. Meet the blogger. Make sure to bring value. Interact with him, buy him drinks, bring value in the form of opinion about conference sessions, ideas to write on, connecting him to other bloggers, etc.

10. Follow up and talk about your own product. This is only the last step after you developed a relationship that provides value. Note that most bloggers are blogging on weekends and working during the week.

Top 10 SEO Tips

I recently did some research about the field of SEO. I thought I would share some observations:

1. from some reason my experience is that wordpress works much better for SEO compared to any other platform. Not sure why.

2. try to get back links from gov and edu sites. Some of them are easy to get and they have a high link authority.

3. SEObook and SEMrush are great tools for tracking your SEO progress

4. make a lean website that loads quickly.

5. have unique IP addresses for different domains. The hosting will be a bit more expensive but the SEO impact justifies it.

6. The juice of a backlink is dependent on the quality of the website linking to your site: page rank and authority but it also depends on how close are the topics of the pages on the two sides of the links. If you have a website about finance, linking in from a gossip blog would not give you much juice.

7. Deep linking is having other website link to internal pages in your site. The more pages you have links going to the better.

8. If your content is duplicate Google will simply ignore it. So far Google doesn't seem to penalize - just ignore duplicates.

9. You can get many back links by sharing content, video or a widget and including a link back. This technique of sharing something to get links is known as linkbait.

10. Focus on a small number of search phrases at a time and have a URL or domain that reflect the search phrase and content to match.

 

 

Thoughts on Mediamind acquisition

Earlier this week Mediamind (formerly EyeBlaster) was acquired by DG for $414 million in all cash transaction. As noted by several Industry vaterns, the main motivation for DG with this move is to enter the digital advertising market. While the acquisition makes perfect sense in retrospect I'm wondering how many experts was able to predict such an acquisiiton before it happend. You have to give the credit to Gal Trifon who found an oppotunity to sell by not looking under the light and chasing the usual suspects (Google, Microsoft, ...).

This brings another interesting observation that there is a difference between selling a small company and selling a big company. Small companies can be bought by a bigger company from the same industry (mainly for their technology). Examples in that category - 5min Acquisition by AOL, Dapper acquisition by Yahoo or Teracent acquisitoin by Google. At the same time, if you were able to grow your comapany beyond a certain size like Mediamind did you will be better off looking for your buyer by positioning yourself as a category leader and looking for a buyer outside of the market. Another example of this kind of acquisition is the acquisition of Omniture by Adobe where Adobe - a company that provides technologies and tools for creative agencies acquired omniture who are a category leader in the e-commerce analytics space.

 

Quick notes on SEO

As I’m learning more and more on SEO these days, I thought I will share some of the basic concepts for those who are less familiar with it:

Page Rank – this is a number between 1 and 10 that Google assigns to each domain based on a few parameters. A higher number means your page is more likely to appear higher in the search results compared to a page that has similar relevancy. Here are a few of the factors that google will take into consideration in determining your page rank:

• Domain Age – younger domains can’t get high page ranks
• Back links – This refers to sites linking in to your website
• Traffic – the more the better

Keyword domains – this is a method of repeating the desired search phrase in the domain name often with hyphens between words (e.g. www.auto-insurance-cheap-quotes.info). This method is often used by affiliates who want to target specific search terms and get in the top 10 results and then sell the traffic to a company that can actually provide the product or service. Here is a video by Google on this subject:

 

Back link brokers – since google highly appreciates back links as part of you SEO rank, there used to be a whole business around selling and buying those links and some websites would just have a page with tons of outgoing links in them so they can sell them. Google made some changes to its algorithm to ignore websites who have too many outgoing links and also started factoring in the page rank of the website linking back in the algorithm so these days you need to get back links from high ranking websites in order to rank higher.

No Follow – another popular way to get a lot of back links was to post comments and other types of user generated content and including a link in the contribution. No Follow is an HTML attribute telling Google algorithm to ignore the link in the comment. Posting a back link in a website that has this is pointless but it’s very easy to detect by viewing the source of the web page (CTRL + U on most browsers) and looking (CTRL + F) this up.

Some common misconceptions:

• The content has to be readable to humans to rank high – not true and in fact most of the pages appearing in the top results in popular affiliate categories would make no sense if you read them closely
• The .com domain is the best one to have – not true for SEO – it actually makes no difference for Google and other extensions (.info, .org, .biz) are more likely to be available. It does, however, make it easier for users to get back to you if that’s your goal.

This is obviously just the tip of the iceberg. There is a lot more content about this topic online. You can assume that if somebody has mastered SEO, he will appear high on google.

 

 

Are you Still Calling your Employees Resources?

Have you noticed that more and more companies are renaming the HR department to Human Capital? Is employees really resources that you move around like pieces of equipment or are they the core asset in your company? I guess that depends on the type of the company. In the High Tech Industry the answer is very clear – the employees are one of the biggest assets of the company. In other industries it might not be the case but even if it isn’t – calling employees resources is quite diminishing and bears very little benefit.

One way to take this approach to a more practical level is in the way the company is staffing projects. Most companies would look at the project as the core and will ask what employees/resources we can use to staff the project? A company that really treats its employees as assets will probably try to keep the teams together and assigning projects to a team that is already working together even if it means that the project has to wait a few days more. This creates a situation where the team has already passed all the stages of forming and learning to work with each other so when they take on the project they start performing immediately. It also means that the team sticks with the project from the beginning until the end and has more accountability for a high quality timely delivery. The team also gets to enjoy the success together which builds up the team as a unit and enhances motivation and performance. A true WIN-WIN.

 

Lean Startup - Pivoting all the Way to the Exit

A lot was said about Pivoting and the Lean Startup approach. From my experience, very few startup companies end up in the same direction they started with. The reality is that startup companies work in rapidly changing markets and one of the only advantages they have is their ability to change course quickly and spend as little as possible on their way to finding the right course. More than lean startup is about succeeding cheaply, it is about failing cheaply and than doing it over and over again until you succeed. In order for that to work, you need a closed loop of feedback. This is the key component and you will have that only if you expose your product to the market early and often. Lean startup works extremely well with Cloud, SAAS and Web2.0 apps - these type of startup companies can expose their product to the market with very little development effort and can experiment with many product variations easily.

Eric Ries, who also writes the blog "Lessons Learned" sums up the concept in his speech in the last web2.0 expo. Here is the speech captured in a video.

 

 

That Movie about Facebook

Yesterday I had the opportunity to watch the movie "The Social Network" (thanks to Gemini VC for that). BTW, this would be a good place to say that if you haven't seen the movie and plan to see it you should probably stop reading if you don't want to spoil it.

I don't believe the movie deserves an Academy Award (although there has been some talk about that) and It's pretty clear that the movie is fiction and not necessarily loyal to the true story. However, I did found the movie truly inspiring - I actually wished a girl would have dumped me back in my days in Tel Aviv University so I would have the motivation to come up with something like that. I bet that the next computer science classes all around the world will be packed with students dreaming of making the next big thing.

One of the points that I found the most inspiring is that both Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker really cared about changing the world and not so much about how to monetize the change.

I also found the ridiculous light in which the movie presents the Winklevoss twins slightly amusing. The twins are blaming and suing Mark for stealing their idea while it's very obvious that the social network idea was already implemented by companies like Myspace and Friendster. I touched this point in 2 previous posts: Signing NDA with Investors and Startup Ideas are Worthless - I believe facebook is a great example of how the same idea can be worthless in some hands while the execution is making all the difference.

 

 

AdKeeper - A New Startup that Let's You Keep Ads You Liked - Very Relevant for Video Ads

I just ran into a very interesting company called AdKeeper. The idea is to basically let users keep an ad in the same way you would cut an ad out of a newspaper. Pretty basic yet very useful for users who are hesitant to click on an ad and prefer a service they can predict and trust. 

The founder of this company is Scott Kurnit, who also founded about.com which will definitely help it reach the critical mass of partnerships required for this type of companies.

 

 

I found this service even more relevant to In-Stream video ads such as pre-rolls, mid-rolls, and post-rolls that tend to disappear after 30 seconds unless they are clicked.

Will be very interesting to watch this company evolves.

Bringing Guy's 2 by 2 to the ground

I first saw Guy's 2 by 2 in his presentation The Art of Start which I highly recommend. In his presentation, Guy uses funny examples to bring across a simple point that your product needs to be both unique and valuable.

While really enjoying Guy's examples and sense of humor, his point seemed very simplistic so I didn't give it a lot of thought. Guy's claim that your product needs to bring value to the customer and needs to be unique felt more like common sense than profound wisdom that someone should take the time to fully understand it. 

It was only years later when I realized that the true value of this advice relies in actually taking the idea you have for a future product,  breaking it down to a specific use case and than validating it by using a specific potential customer and a specific competitor. Going back to Guy's 2 by 2 - the Value aspect means really checking that the specific customer gains value from your product, that he really cares about this value, that he is willing to pay money for this value and that the value justifies the price he has to pay in management attention, resources and product price. On the Uniqueness aspect, you need to ask yourself, the customer and other people in the industry what would be the alternatives for obtaining a similar value to what your product gives. Once you have done that, try to check how unique your product is. Most likely, you will find out that some features are standard while other features are unique. If that's the case, you need to go back to the value aspect and isolate the value of the unique features of your product compared to what the customer can already obtain using existing products and check that he still has value.

It is recommended to repeating this process with multiple customers who represent large market segments until your market size is big enough.