Southeast VC

Increased Company Transparency May Help Home Relationships

Working for a startup can cause some friction with a spouse. You may get paid less for needing to work longer hours. Going back to my days at Red Hat (1998-2000), I remember the overnights and weekends many of us worked for a fraction of the salary we may have made elsewhere.

To help with this, I really like the strategy one local tech company has done successfully and I thought I'd share it. As background, this company has 12 employees, no revenue yet and is funded by the CEO and the other co-founder. All the employees are working around the clock for reduced salaries. I think the company has a lot of potential and has a lot of smart people behind it.

About once every other month, the company gets pizza delivered and they invite all employees, spouses and partners (lawyer, accountant, etc.). The co-founders give an update on the business talking about things like status of product development, recent prospect meetings, market trends and new hires. I like this for two reasons:

1) Most importantly, it provides an opportunity for the spouses to be closer to the company. They have an opportunity to meet the company's leaders. They feel more included and maybe better understand what's happening at the company and it isn't just 1 person sharing it over dinner at home. For at least for an hour or so they are part of the action.

2) As a side benefit the partners stay informed - which I think is important too! Many times the partners will be more excited than the company may present. And that excitement from the partners rubs off on the spouses!

Its clear that spouses and families are making an "investment" in the company too! They part with the person that is working at the startup (may mean less hours at home) and sarcrifice income as well (maybe scaled back vacations).

The important thing here is that the increased transparency works really well for this company and may work well for other companies at this stage as well. I know everyone has enjoyed getting to know each other better too. It has created a tighter, more family atmosphere.

Morgan Stanley Internet Trends

The guys at Morgan Stanley sent me a really good report on internet trends that I thought would be good to share. Download Internet Trends

The report covers topics like mobile internet, online advertising, online commerce, communications and cloud computing.

I don't have a lot of time to comment this morning about it, but there is a lot of good data in here.

New Investment for SCV: Zift Solutions

We were really excited to announce our investment in Zift Solutions this week. You can read more about it here, here, here and here, but they are a SaaS company and their goal is to be the leader in marketing program syndication.

HP, SAP and Red Hat use Zift to deliver syndicated marketing through their partners to new prospects.

For the partner, Zift provides a complete marketing platform where content is combined with execution tools making it really simple to use. They can log in, review what a company like HP has created for them, personalize it and use it to increase their sales & marketing activities. You can read about other advantages here.

The feedback from customers we spoke with was so strong and I am amazed how capital efficient the company has been with amount of money they raised from angel investors. They have also been effective working with partners in EMEA and APJ.

And most importantly, this is a group of entrepreneurs we have a multi-year relationship with and is one of the most experienced teams in our region. They have a long history of building several successful marketing software companies. I really look forward to working with Ken, Bryan, Scott, Lionel and joining angel investor Joe Velk on the board.

Also, with the new capital, they are hiring some more smart people - including sales and development. If you read this and know of some interesting candidates, let me know -> [email protected].