With her policies under scrutiny, the Yahoo CEO follows her ban on telecommuting with new perks for new parents.
MindMixer, a startup that helps organizations like the City of San Francisco gather ideas from their communities, has raised $ 4 million in Series B funding.
When the company announced its $ 1.9 million Series A last year, CEO Nick Bowden recalled his work in urban planning, when local governments and agencies would hold public meetings that no one attended. So MindMixer created tools for soliciting ideas and feedback online.
The company says its current customers include the D.C. public school district, Ohio State University, and Coursera. For example, it powers the ImproveSF site, which hosts a number of “challenges” where San Franciscans can contribute suggestions and content around topics that are serious (like food access and the public library) and not (like holiday photos).
Bowden said this week that although he plans to keep focused on “the civic and education markets” in the short-term, MindMixer is also defining those markets broadly — it’s not just for the government. For example, he said there’s definitely an opportunity to use MindMixer in health care, and he has also seen interest that the company could address eventually from nonprofits and businesses.
MindMixer plans to reach 1,000 customers by the end of the year. As its customer base becomes more diverse, the company can do to create “a unified experience,” Bowden said, where it becomes not just a toolset, but also a destination website that people can visit to find ways to engage with a variety of issues that matter to them. In fact, he said the company will be rolling out improvements in that vein in the next couple of months.
The new funding was led by education and financial-planning company Nelnet, with participation from existing investors Dundee Venture Capital and Optimas Group. In the funding press release, Nelnet CEO Mike Dunlap said, the company is “always looking for ways to improve the way we help associates, students and schools reach their goal.”
“It’s a recognition of the fact that there’s absolutely a need for a platform for people to better connect with their constituent base,” Bowden told me.
Since MindMixer recently acquired social media analysis company VoterTide, I also asked if additional money will allow MindMixer to buy more companies. Bowden said that it’s unlikely, and that VoterTide was “a perfect fit for us.”
“I don’t think, on the acquisition front, that we’ll be active,” he said. “That’s not to say that it won’t ever happen.”
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Naveen Tewari is the CEO and founder of mobile advertising company InMobi.
When I co-founded InMobi in 2007, we took a novel “east-to-west” approach to our growth, starting in India before moving into other developing markets, then finally into more traditional “Western” markets as well.
Because this method of expansion didn’t have any precursors, and mobile advertising was at the time still a very new field, we had to chart our own course and set our own example. And as a corollary, we would have to deal with a number of challenges as we discovered that the mobile landscape was different in each geography we entered, and learn to quickly recover from mistakes.
I’d like to talk about some of the challenges we faced and how we dealt with them, as I believe it will be of relevance to other businesses that are trying to build a global footprint:
Learning while doing
Because we were experimenting with a new business model, we often had to rely on intuition as we calculated our next moves. When you are trying to expand across multiple geographies at a rapid pace, you are bound to slip, and we were no exception. For example, our first forays out of India into other geographies, starting with Indonesia and South Africa, did not yield initial success, and we could not gain a strong foothold in the market. Our lack of understanding of the ways in which brands, advertisers, and consumers communicated and interacted in these markets, and incorrect hypotheses about the overall advertising ecosystem, led to delayed revenue streams. But we learned how the ecosystem worked and began expanding our reach in these emerging markets.
Likewise, when we had to extend the capabilities of our platform to serve multiple regions/countries, we almost ran the risk of jeopardizing existing business in India by shifting focus away from it.
We learned quickly from such wrong moves, and this helped us templatize our forays into new countries, and that is the key takeaway:
An experiential learning approach works well if you can recover from your mistakes quickly and identify patterns and models from within a few iterations.
Recalibrating world view frequently
Working with an evolving technology and business model, and one that had numerous dependencies on the moves of key players in the mobile device and platform platform markets, brought with it another set of challenges: frequently making informed decisions on the roadmap of our technology platform, which was the pivot of our business.
In addition, our geographic expansion plan also compelled us to be agile and flexible. Once we had tasted initial success, we laid out a plan to simultaneously expand in Southeast Asia (Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore), Western Europe and Japan. Each of these markets had its own characteristics and was very different from one another. Western Europe was developed, and so was Japan, but the latter is a contained market with little in common with the European market. The emerging markets, on the other hand, were evolving and needed a totally different approach.
Clearly, we had to tailor our approach to suit each market, and this meant that we literally had to revisit our assumptions and plans every quarter.
In all of the above, our overall commitment to speed — in thinking and in action — helped, and our approach of trying out and making course corrections, rather than waiting and watching, stood out. To me, the key takeaway from this experience is staying committed to a strategy for the future, while adapting the tactics to the present.
Shaping Management Mindset
While the first two sets of challenges emanated from the market, the third was more internal and had to do with adopting the right mindset.
As a startup with global ambitions, we had several mental hurdles to cross. Learning to think big while being small was one of them. Some of us had a tendency to want to do one thing very well as opposed to developing broader competencies and skills, which is a prerequisite to build scale. Another issue was balancing our short-term needs with our long-term goals. Nowhere was it a bigger challenge than when we opened offices in new geographies and set out to hire the regional anchors. How much to pay, how long to wait for the right candidate, what profile should we opt for? These were real questions we had to find answers for. We made a few errors of judgment here as well, like hiring candidates about whom we were not completely convinced, before we made the tough call to wait for the right candidates and pay them the right compensation.
The last thing we had to do, of course, was to transform our thinking, speaking and actions to reflect those of a truly global organization, and make the transition from being part of an “Indian” team to a cross-cultural one. This entailed creating a consistent corporate culture with frequent interactions between teams based in India and those in the other markets. By encouraging two-way travel, we ensured that teams from India understood market and cross-cultural nuances early on.
In sum, we learned to be open, introspective and aware of the consequences of your behavior and actions.
Thinking back, what allowed us to surmount the challenges we faced and mold our thinking and actions to suit the purpose was our total commitment to our vision and the excitement of creating an innovative and valuable business model.
That is the overarching message I’d like to leave you with: clarity of vision and purpose is the glue that binds a team together and acts as a lubricant to mitigate the friction caused by obstacles along the way.
For more information on InMobi’s East-to-West strategy, see Naveen Tewari’s first post, here.
Naveen Tewari is InMobi’s CEO and founder. He graduated from Harvard Business School and worked at Charles River Ventures and McKinsey & Company before starting InMobi. InMobi, based in Bangalore with offices in Singapore and San Francisco, currently employs more than 900 people and has taken $ 216 million to date in venture funding.
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Editor’s note: Peter Levine is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He has been a lecturer at both MIT and Stanford business schools and was the former CEO of XenSource, which was acquired by Citrix in 2007. Prior to XenSource, Peter was EVP of Strategic and Platform Operations at Veritas Software, where he helped grow the organization from no revenue to more than $ 1.5 billion, and from 20 employees to over 6,000. Follow him on his blog and on Twitter @Peter_Levine.
As a former CEO and senior executive, there was a time when I did not quite understand the profound impact a CEO has on the culture of a company, even though I always knew culture was important.
The organization reflects the behavior and characteristics of the CEO, and that establishes the culture. Foster an environment of open communication and the organization inherits a culture of open communication. Operationally detailed? The organization becomes operationally detailed. Political? The organization becomes political. Curse a lot? The organization curses. Angry? The organization gets angry. Have a big office? Everyone wants a big office. It doesn’t matter what’s written on a coffee mug or on a “culture” slide, what you do as a CEO, day in and day out, and how you behave will define your company’s culture.
Despite the best intentions, companies often become culturally dysfunctional. This occurs when leadership has a perception about the culture that conflicts with reality, or leadership behaves differently than what might be written down.
The organization reflects the behavior and characteristics of the CEO, and that establishes the culture.
One of the most studied examples of cultural dysfunction occurred at Enron, the former energy-trading giant. The CEO (Ken Skilling) and several top executives were arrested for a pattern of deceit, dishonesty and illegal financial practices. They promoted a culture of dishonesty, self-dealing and self-enrichment that destroyed the company. Ironically, the Enron code of ethics outlined four key principles: communication, respect, integrity and excellence… So, yes, culture matters and the CEO defines it.
Cultural dysfunction is not limited to large companies. When I arrived at XenSource, which was a 50-person company, the culture was dysfunctional, despite the fact that the founding team believed the culture to be awesome and supportive of innovation and collaborative thinking. There were two telltale signs: 1) Employees painted a very different cultural view from the founders; and 2) The responses were inconsistent with each another, indicating that the culture was a free-for-all with very little leadership. One clear example of the inconsistency resulted in the organization having two engineering efforts that competed with each other. Here was a company with a supposedly “collaborative, non-political” culture that had engineering teams pitted against each other to see who would win. The competitive activity turned out to be corrosive and undermined the intended culture of the company.
I often talk about CEO self-awareness as one of the key attributes of corporate success. In the case of XenSource, the leadership espoused and verbalized cultural “intent,” but practiced and allowed something very different in the company. The company almost failed due to a highly dysfunctional culture. Make sure what you believe is what is truly happening in the company.
Stemming dysfunction requires leadership and taking some simple but important actions: proactively define cultural attributes important to the organization—write them down and let people know what they are, and “walk the talk.” You must practice and exemplify your culture and have a mechanism to review culture deep within the organization. Ask the following questions:
- Is the organization’s culture consistent with the defined attributes?
- Where are the differences?
- What are we doing right or wrong to keep a strong and consistent cultural backbone in the company?
The Cultural Paradox: I can’t change the culture because that’s not part of our culture
Culture is formed — whether intentionally or not — in the early days of a company’s life. Activities and behaviors are repeated and these become the elements that shape the culture of the company. Examples of such early practices might be: 1) The founding team always interviews all new people applying to the company; or 2) a product-oriented focus in everything the company does. The accepted and repeated practices become the culture and define how the company operates.
However, what has worked in the early days might not be as effective as the company grows up. As a result, you might be forced to choose between two conflicting cultural attributes.
Take the attribute “the founding team must always interview new people”—a great cultural practice intended to ensure new employees are a perfect fit. Is there a point where growth is hampered because the company can’t interview fast enough and candidates go elsewhere? What part of the culture do you change? Limit growth or change your hiring practice? Changing either impacts culture.
One of the most difficult aspects for technical founders is hiring outside the comfort zone of the founding team. This is evident when hiring sales, marketing and finance people. A good example of this is how a technical founder might apply engineering hiring techniques to a sales organization, which my partner Ben Horowitz recently blogged about here. The fear here is that bringing on non-technical people will destroy the company culture. Do you put engineers in all the non-engineering functions and continue to only hire technical people, or do you augment the culture and integrate new and different organizations into the company? Here again, sticking to the past practice/culture of only hiring technical people might be counter to building a great finance or sales organization.
Existing culture can get in the way of future growth and company leadership must steer the transition. Changes to practices and culture should be done by first asking why something is done a certain way and what’s the intended outcome. Preserving the intended outcome should trump the practice.
A strong culture is the backbone of any organization, and the CEO is the standard-bearer and the agent of change.
Let’s go back to the example, “the founding team shall interview all new applicants.” The intended outcome is to make sure that all new employees are of the acceptable caliber and intelligence, and understand the culture and origins of the organization. The problem is the system does not scale, particularly as candidates are hired around the world and at a pace that far outstrips the capacity for the founders to handle.
A change to the practice might be to empower key employee “ambassadors” who act as a proxy for the founding team. Alternatively, maybe just one of the founders meets all new candidates as opposed to all founders meeting all candidates. If part of the intended outcome is for a candidate to meet the founders and get a feel for the company, then have all new employees meet the founders at a lunch or dinner after they join the company. Developing a strong and scalable interview process and on-boarding/mentoring system will ensure that the intended culture is preserved while steering change from an operational perspective.
The concept of managing culture may seem a bit heavy-handed, particularly in tech companies that pride themselves on being free from overbearing rules and bureaucracy. However, not managing culture can be likened to not managing growth, or not managing expenses, or simply not managing and certainly not leading…
- Self-awareness. If you can’t accept self-awareness, you should not be CEO.
- What are you trying to accomplish? What’s the end game?
- Translate energy to the areas you are least comfortable understanding.
A strong culture is the backbone of any organization and the CEO is the standard bearer and the agent of change. In a recent Fast Company article, GitHub Co-founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner shares his perspective on how he and his cofounders have thought about and managed the company culture from 10 people to 160. Regardless of age, background and experience, culture is something that evolves with the CEO and the process of creating a great culture requires leadership to routinely and consistently assess and exemplify the core values of the organization.
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