Obama Visits Austin to Learn

“Through these jobs tours,” shared Bailey Bounds at AustinXL, “President Obama aims to learn what has helped make American businesses, schools and workers successful and use them as models to encourage Congress to support the idea that the middle class is the engine of economic growth.”

President Obama in Austin
Rodolfo Gonzalez/American-Statesman

Susanne Bowen, CEO of PeopleAdmin and chair of the Austin Technology Council’s Community Foundation, shared last week at ATC’s CEO Summit the fact that the technology skill pipeline in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) is critical to growth. In related news, Silicon Hills News‘s Laura Lorek reported that “Austin is expected to create 10,000 new high tech jobs by 2017 and 2,400 of those openings are for software developers,” according to an ATC survey. “But companies,” Bowen adds (and I’d add, entrepreneurs), “cannot continue to rely strictly on recruiting and importing that talent from other areas. Those are not sustainable, nor cost effective solutions to the challenge. So we need to grow our own talent here in central Texas.”

There’s a subtle and important turn of the phrase there that I hope you caught, a change in the wording that we explored here just a couple weeks ago. Skilled resources are in demand and indeed, what Austin has nailed and from which the country must learn, but what we really need is talent, and talent comes from experience through ongoing education beyond skills training.

Coincidentally, RISE week gives us all the ideal opportunity (funny, that’s what Obama’s sign in that photo says: Opportunity) to learn with the President; and that begs the question, what do we really need to learn? What is Austin doing right? And what can the rest of the country, the world, learn from Austin’s example? Let’s take a look.

RISE Up to Success

I regret that I’m a couple days late in getting this post up; and have missed the opportunity to encourage you to look at some exceptional topics the last couple days.

The spark for my draft was more than a handful of incredible entrepreneurs in Austin asking how to make the most of the exceptional, and extensive, RISE agenda. Regardless, this post, my post, is more of an exploration of what I’d encourage more entrepreneurs to explore in their own development of their personal talents, than a guide to RISE. Those that know me can already predict where my suggestions are going to lead, Austin’s technical talent and thought leaders in innovation are capably creative, amazingly inventive, and capable – that technical capability and sophistication is what’s drawing so many to Austin. What we can still stand to learn, is how to scale, how to tap the capital we need to think big, and how to help the venture community to uncover the hidden gems in our community and feel confident in their investments in us.

What to Attend During RISE

The single most important talk to attend, the talk for which I’m hanging my head in sorrow for not getting this article up in time, was today; this one. Laura Kilcrease, Brett Hurt (is he still @BazaarBrett?), Michele Skelding, and Rick Timmons (whom I questioned linking to because he’s a Wildcat), with the City of Austin, discussing Angel and VC funding. Why? Because MONDAY (which I also missed *shame*), he affirmed that “Austin is still primarily a business to business or B2B town – dating back to the impact from the Tivoli days and now the days of Bazaarvoice, SolarWinds, Perficient, and Convio. That’s where the majority of startups focus their attention. But that’s not where the biggest money is.” (I’m paraphrasing as that’s how Silicon Hills News captured his sentiment. Brett contacted me to clarify this point that Silicon Hills News wasn’t complete on. The point he made at the session is that if you look at one of the most successful B2B companies in history, Salesforce.com, it is worth $26 billion. By contrast, one of the most successful B2C companies in history – Apple is worth $402 billion – 15 times that of Salesforce.com. It is great that HomeAway is worth $2.6 billion and is a huge B2C success for Austin as compared to the dot-com boom days where Austin struck out in this area. It would be nice to see more of these B2C successes, and perhaps that will be from people that eventually leave HomeAway and RetailMeNot to found their own B2C companies.

“I only want to work with people who are interested in going big.” says Hurt. “If I measure the second half of my life by impact, how will I measure impact? I measure it by how I help others and how many jobs they create. I don’t want to waste my time by working on projects that will have limited impact. If I can see a clear path where I can help them get to $100 million in revenue and then maybe to as much as $1 billion of revenue, those are the projects I’m interested in. There are companies that are thinking that way, about creating something well beyond their own abilities (such as to launch a small consulting business based on their individual skill set, or as I call them in my Lucky7 post about the state of tech entrepreneurship in Austin, stage-one entrepreneurs.”

Hurt went on to suggest that the Austin ecosystem is lacking people who want to change the world, not entrepreneurs, per se, but the venture capitalists who enable what the rest of of us make happen. Added Hurt, “If you’re just looking to flip a company, if the goal is just to enrich yourself, you’re not going to change the world. Maybe investors will get 3-to-5 X of their money. If the goal is really to build a big company, you’re going to need a lot of capital to do it.”

What’s your goal? From what do you want the President and the world to learn of Austin? Are we flipping returns or changing the world? How do we take skills and turn them into the talents that change the world??

So… where do we pick up fundraising from here?

First, let me say, damn it all if I didn’t miss a bunch… Bryan Menell’s talk on AngelList, Paul Ramirez on Angel Capital,
Amy Hagstrom Miller’s talk on how a lack of capital shouldn’t stop you, or Roberto Rondero de Mosier or Hall Martin on Crowdfunding. Why am I mentioning these talks even though we’ve missed them?? That very question is the reason: these are a few of the people who get it; from which to learn. Good news is, we’re not done yet and tomorrow, Wednesday, is a great place to start.

Got Funding? Tomorrow at 10 am, at the UT Administration Building, Josh Alexander, CEO of Toopher, tries to help answer that very question by pointing out that now, like never before, there are an incredible number of ways to get money. PLEASE don’t tell me you’ve only explored one possibility.

WHY had you best not focused on ONE fundraising channel? Thursday, Shari Wynne is pointing out the falsehoods about raising capital both (I hope), why you can’t and why you shouldn’t. Never consider one source, one approach, the right answer (a truism of everything you’re doing as an entrepreneur). Later Thursday, Raquel Valdez will help explain the various sources to capital while Matt Lyons will talk through strategies to going after the seed and angel financing so many need (and on which so many focus). It’s a toss up because they are at the same time… the various possibilities or the strategies to go after the conventional source. Cap your day with a traditional source out of left field – go after a grant: arguably the largest source of untapped capital available to startups.

And how does our RISE to funding cap off? With a “super panel” on Crowdfunding. A must attend; for if you don’t appreciate the way in which crowdfunding is going to change fundraising in Austin yet, you’ll soon learn, by being left behind.

Interesting… a synonym to RISE is to GROW

Having learned the role that capital plays, and how to get it if we need it, the real question every entrepreneur should be asking is how to grow. Not just acquire customers or sell more widgets, but how to truly scale. If our goal is to follow Obama’s plan to put the economy back to work (that is Obama’s plan isn’t it?), a successful venture, an exit or an acquisition, isn’t our goal here; we’re thinking big. As Hurt put it, “If I can see a clear path where I can help them get to $100 million in revenue and then maybe to as much as $1 billion of revenue, those are the projects I’m interested in.” How do get get to $1 billion?

First, again one we missed, if you don’t have mobile strategy, you don’t have a future. The discussion hosted by Guthrie Bunn Monday WAS a must attend because a mobile strategy has nothing to do with an iPhone app. In fact, if you are a startup built on an iPhone app… well… good luck. Rather, the point of the discussion is critical – you must know what the implications our of our increasingly mobile, hand-held based, society are on your business. We missed the talk at this point, but you can’t miss Guthrie, he’s good people.

Oh wait! I didn’t just miss one awesome talk, I missed the opportunity to point out an entire series. Jan Triplett, Monday, brought us Scalability Testing: How Far Can You Grow? and you best not even be in business for yourself if you don’t know the answer to that one. Tuesday, CEO of the Business Success Center, Triplett hosted talks on your Sales playbook AND how to scale not just nationally but internationally. Here’s the good news, where I failed to deliver a timely alert, you can always still track down smart people (I’ll leave you to figure out why the color of that text is different and the implications of clicking your mouse there0.

Jeez Paul, if we missed such good stuff, what can we learn about scale this week other than following you on twitter?? Great question. I’ll give you a minute to come back from twitter…

Why is this cool picture of Austin here? Because, as usual, I couldn’t stop writing and needed something to break up the text. And it’s a cool picture by John R. Rogers.

Later in the day, Deborah Toodle covers Common Mistakes Entrepreneurs Under 30 Make and I’m going to encourage everyone under 60 to go to this session. First because those under 30 don’t yet know the mistakes they haven’t made and second because most over 30 don’t realize that the internet has completely changed the game and what you once learned no longer applies.

Ultimately, the point of this phase of the article is to help you figure out how to go big (or go home). On Friday, Adam Morehead is talking about building your organization for growth and it’s too bad that’s Friday because that’s really a foundational talk. What we want to explore is who you need to grow. As I’ve talked extensively about the need for Marketing, and who/where in Austin to turn, let’s look deeper at RISE (certainly, you can find more than enough about Marketing). Dean Bogues & Jeremy David start, in a sense, Thursday with a talk about building your business for maximum value from there check out Doug Bain‘s talk on your first Salesperson, “As a start-up founder, you do everything:” points out Bain, “R&D, PR, marketing, accounting, sales. Don’t make the mistake most start-ups do when they grow: failing to effectively transition your responsibilities. The sales transition can be the trickiest and riskiest of all.”

Follow Bain with Barker as partnerships are really the means to the greatest incremental validation, value, and traction for early entrepreneurs. Consider for a moment, forget marketing, forget sales, forget your first few customers… what would it mean to clinch that key partner that changes everything for your business? Ask Bob.

How might you capture all of this intelligence, this experience, in one swoop? Thursday, Joel Trammell is sharing 10 steps to a 9 figure exit. Here’s why that talk matters: it isn’t the 10 steps – there is no roadmap to success – it’s the 9 figures. Think big. Trammell discusses in particular, the importance of being world-class in every department – from HR to finance to sales. That’s not about skills, that’s about talent. Let’s learn together how to foster that talent.

At the end of this week, I hope you learn only one thing, if anything. That the name of RISE is all you need to plant in the back of your mind as you venture forth. Never settle. Never give up. Never stop learning. Rise to the occasion, the opportunity you have an entrepreneur and do great things.

That debate, has to do with the fact that as a capitalist society takes hold of something, anything, we have a natural tendency to maximize the value of said thing by increasing it’s market penetration (scale), reducing the cost (innovation), and removing constraints (efficiency). A random walk through history validates this idea as it can be said for just about anything from food (from gardens in our backyards to corporate, industrial farms), photography (from chemicals and paper to instagram), the automobile or PC (from the product of hobbyists to commoditized technology)… you get the idea. I’m sure the same can be said of software so can it also be said of the programming languages and skillsets therein?

Scrambling for Programmers

The excitement of such a debate is the constant ebb and flow of the programming skillset. A language en vogue today will be deprecated tomorrow. The platform or user interface of yesterday will be replaced by Friday. Just consider for a moment, that only years ago, we had no smart phones, no tablets, no game consoles… software was designed for the PC form factor and only a handful of programming languages were necessary. Now, with the web and the never ending release of new user experiences (Has anyone started redesigning their mobile app for Google Glasses yet?), programmers nearly have to be machines themselves, able to both do their jobs AND keep up with the next, the latest, the greatest, for which they remain relevant or risk dying off.

Question it? Think about simply, what it took to create a web site 15 years ago. You had to know how to write HTML. You had to code. Today, not only is knowing HTML alone, worthless (of course, there is an exception in understanding HTML5), anyone coding a basic website from scratch is as smart as that Chief Executive who doesn’t understand and embrace technology. The web page has gone through the same evolution as the farm, photograph, and automobile – as the commercialization of the internet took place, aspiring entrepreneurs built DreamWeaver (ugh, remember that?), Geocities, Joomla, Wix, WordPress… the web site has become pervasive, one can develop an exceptional one with no technical knowledge at all, at exceptionally low cost.

So it’s true of software, is it true of the skillset? Is the debate about how we commoditize things we need true of not just the product but the skills behind them? Perhaps. Marketing automation has replaced much of what marketers once did. Web analytics continue to replace traditional business analysts. Accountants lost work to Mint.com and Realtors became irrelevant because of Zillow. No. No, wait. No, they didn’t. The art inherent in skill can’t be commodotized; it can’t be automated or industrialized. Experienced marketers are worth their weight in gold not because of what they do but what they know. Analytics tools still simply provide data and intelligence, metrics that have to be understood and interpreted. Mint.com, perhaps, empowered Accountants and Tax Professional and consumers were empowered with the knowledge of the value of understanding their finances and Zillow enabled Realtors to focus on closing more homes, stimulating the economy and our housing market, by leaving Zillow and the buyers and sellers to do much of the heavily lifting about the details of the industry that could, should, be commodotized.

And so too is the case with programmers and developers; engineering isn’t about what, it’s about how well, how efficiently, how effectively. Great developers are too worth their weight in gold (perhaps more), and yet, we will continue to deprecate the languages with which they work.

As a result, we scramble with both opportunity and desperation.

CIO Magazine reported today in fact, CIOs Struggle with the Great Talent Hunt. Over a two-year period in 2010, Stephanie Overby reports, Bill Weeks, new CIO of SquareTwo Financial, saw 70 percent of his development team walk out the door. More than half left; Weeks fired the rest.

It might sound like a leadership disaster, but it was the best thing that had happened to the $250 million asset-recovery company’s IT organization in years.

The company, 3 years ago, was in growth mode, but, as often is the case in established businesses, IT was falling behind. Weeks wanted to transform the team into one focused on results, “but many on staff refused to engage with business.” Sound familiar? The previous CIO of SquareTwo Financial had established that very culture, “Business people are busy doing business things, and if I catch you talking to them, I’ll fire you,” shared Weeks with CIO Magazine.

Many more IT departments or technology professionals fail to simply keep up with that evolution in the software and languages involved. As those business people, with whom Weeks wanted his team to collaborate, get involved, technology gets commercialized and it’s expected to become more efficient, effective, and inexpensive – results oriented.

That opportunity we face, is to make software and technology more accessible, efficient, available, and pervasive. In doing that, we can all leverage it for our business; we no longer need the web site developer to code a site in HTML. Entrepreneurs move into the market to enable tools, software, and services that create businesses out of the gaps left behind… we don’t need to hire developers, we have WordPress, but most business owners don’t even have the time for that. But we also foster desperation.

As a result of the rapid pace at which technology evolves, the aversion of business and technology to truly work together as one, the control over executive organizations by inexperienced CEOs and business owners, and the inability of everyone, from Marketers to Programmers, to simply keep up, our economy isn’t facing a talent shortage, it’s facing a skills gap. And that is a critical distinction because what businesses fail to embrace is the fact that you aren’t hiring the skill, you’re hiring the talent. Skills can be learned, skills can be replaced by technology. Talent, the art and experience in what we all do, is irreplaceable and invaluable.

Adam Popescu shared on Mashable today that Coding Is the Must-Have Job Skill of the Future, and he’s right, but as he insight-fully goes on to point out in the article, the skill is not what matters, is the talent involved.

“Well, we may be getting ahead of ourselves slightly. It’s uncertain that HTML and CSS in their current form will be on the menu of the next decade. But what we do know is, for the foreseeable future, coding is one of the most important and desirable skills there is, no matter how it evolves,” writes Popescu. “Coding is the new black. And it’s getting so hot that there are a slew of startups focusing on teaching coding — to your kids.”

“Learning HTML and CSS creates a really valuable way for people to efficiently design for the web,” explains Asher Hunt, leading mobile designer at LivePerson. “I say this because understanding those languages provides understandings of their limitations, and general capabilities. For every pixel I put down in photoshop, I know exactly how I’m going to code that in HTML and CSS.” That bold highlight is my own; learning the skill, a skill that’s constantly changing and evolving, teaching the talent we all so desperately seek.

“The value of coding is learning how to use data to drive decisions,” says C.J. Windisch, lead engineer and co-founder of GonnaBe.

As the Web Goes, So Goes Mobile

Validating these ideas is an interesting set of developments in the industry that have taken place in just the last few days.

Yesterday, my Quora thread list up with the question, what mobile apps could conceivably cost >$750k to build? Consider what WordPress did for website development, it’s a great question, how on earth could it possibly cost an exceptional amount of money to create a mobile app??? Mobile software, sure, perhaps; but an app for a business?? Anurag Rastogi, CEO of newgenapps.com proposed today in reply, “Smartphones pioneered by iPhone are relatively new, and being able to develop apps for them using distribution Channel’s like App Store or Google play became mainstream just a few years back…. The app stores have democratized ideation. Anyone can build an app and launch it to a global audience without incurring huge distribution costs.”

Well well.

And then today, in my own back yard here in Austin, AVAI Mobile announced a mobile application content management platform (you mean like WordPress for websites?) for the enterprise mobile market. AMP, as they call it, enables enterprises to “avoid the high cost and risk associated with custom app development and versioning by leveraging a proven platform as a service.”

“We are announcing AMP Enterprise to address a very clear need among mid to large enterprises for a scalable yet customizable mobile app development platform which eliminates the need for custom development on every project,” says Rand Arnold, CEO of AVAI Mobile. “AMP Enterprise is an extension to our popular Cloud-based AMP™ solution already being successfully used as a development platform for our channel partners.”

According to a Q1 2013 Mobile Enterprise Report from Appcelerator (registration required to download the report), the largest obstacle facing Enterprise is a scarcity of mobile development resources.

Well what do you know.

“AVAI Mobile’s AMP Platform allowed us to communicate the latest updates of our products and specifications more efficiently with our team and partners,” says John Hewson, Residential Solutions Marketing Manager for Lutron Electronics

There’s that word again.

Indeed, entrepreneurs are moving to fill the commercial opportunity and gap, created as mobile software and languages become pervasive and commoditized.  The talent to accelerate our economy through technology is enabling all of us to leverage the skills as our access to them becomes more efficient. Rastogi went on to posit that the companies to look to in providing services for mobile are those that:

1. Saw the future that mobile and cloud are going to be big
2. Did not copy anyone, started early and have a great track record
3. Have the competence to deliver
4. Are not legacy companies, old System Integrators, who live on support business for enterprise companies like SAP and MSFT who have 3 year release cycles. Mobile has 3 month cycles
5. Companies that charge a ridiculous amount like 500,000. The project sizes are much smaller and the larger companies are at a loss to adjust to this new normal (funny thing though, I think he meant to say, Companies that don’t charge…” no?)

As went the web, so goes everything we do with technology.

Via the definitive source for every question encyclopedic in nature: When planning civil engineering projects or other large constructions, the strata of the area where the construction takes place is a significant factor in design decisions. For example if a canal is to be built on a route where the strata are not watertight, the canal will have to be lined with some form of waterproof material (usually clay). – thanks Wikipedia!

Marketing vs. Advertising & what that has to do with Stratum ¯\(°_o)/¯

Not long ago, a new acquaintance, here in Austin, kicked off our get-to-know one another meeting by asking how I could have recommendations on LinkedIn for skill in both Online Advertising and Online Marketing, “What’s the difference?” he asked.

It’s at this point that I had to pick my jaw off the floor while being struck by an epiphany: How many business owners, entrepreneurs, and startups have no idea what it means to design a business for growth?? Here, in one simple question, is perhaps the most profound insight to the challenge that 99% of entrepreneurs struggle with in building businesses. Are you advertising or are you marketing? Perhaps more fundamentally, do you appreciate the parallels between building skyscrapers and scaling new ventures? Have you figured out what the stratum in building has to do with the architecting a business for growth?

Growth Hacking or… the responsibility of the CTO and CMO

Admittedly, my thoughts here are the result of a series of seemingly unrelated events. Isn’t that the way it tends to go? Sparked by the early days of Growth Hacking (a concept with which we still find ourselves in infancy), I’ve been considering the point at which the CTO in an organization will merge with that of the CMO. The idea, simply, is that business today is so intrinsically dependent on both technology and marketing, you have to wonder if and when that chief executive will be one in the same.

And then, a month ago, an old and admired acquaintance (with whom I vaguely recall playing poker in Montauk, NY at a Yahoo! Sales conference) shared some concise perspective via AdAge that helps, perhaps, establish this important point of fact, without making the leap so significant as going to say that your CTO and CMO should be the same person – CMOs: Time to Learn a Little About Ad Tech

Greg Coleman, VP of Global Sales at Yahoo when I was cutting my teeth as a sales engineer and advertising programmer, now President of Criteo, pointed out that “In recent conversations with dozens of top marketers, it is clear to me that the game of digital media and advertising is changing too fast for most.” We’re all familiar with that – most marketers have a hard time keeping up, but who hasn’t encountered a business owner or entrepreneur who has no clue what’s possible or appropriate anymore? Taken in context, Yahoo, for all it’s trials and tribulations, did one thing with the internet exceptionally better than anyone else: it once understood the critical importance of both Sales/Marketing and Technology working together for the sake of the business. Indeed, I was at that very Sales conference with Coleman because Sales, therein, didn’t work in a vacuum; marketing and advertising engineers, like myself, were critical to the experience advertisers had with Yahoo – and in turn, the effectiveness of Yahoo’s Sales organization.

With that context, Coleman goes on to say, “And as hundreds of ad-tech companies clamor for attention in this space, marketers are not set up to go through the vigorous testing loop needed to understand which technology or technologies can help their business grow at a faster clip.”

Of course, the industry has been exploring this evolution of business for years. From the early days of web development and SEO, we asked whether the marketer or the web developer should be accountable for search optimization (unfortunately, many might argue, marketers seem to have “won,” relegating SEO to a marketing channel rather than an inherent quality of the technical prowess of one’s website).

More recently, local Austinites Sam Gaddis and Colin Osburn, whom I’ve come to respect tremendously, flagged and caught my attention with this great article from Franco Beschizza: Is mobile the responsibility of the CIO or CMO? I don’t mean to simplify the article but it could be this concise – Yes. Adds Jay Patel, CEO of IMImobile in the article, “The increasingly active role of CMOs in technology reflects how technology decisions are becoming more important to revenue generation, rather than the productivity and cost optimisation issues CIOs have traditionally been focused on.”

“CMOs are no longer working alone. Internal partnerships with their CFO and CTO are critical to their success. With a huge focus on performance and metrics, the entire C-suite needs to come to the table with a vested interest in the right partner(s),” Coleman went on to validate the direction we’re headed… “To be successful, marketers need to align closely with their CTO staff. This team must be incentivized to test and engage in this process. While CMOs are often held hostage by their CTOs – as goals do not line up in many instances – both departments must align their priorities in order for a testing environment to be successful and meet the needs of the company.”

And that begs the question, are you merely advertising or do you understand the role of that technically inclined marketer (or marketing inclined technology leader)? How many businesses appreciate that the role of Marketing is to architect your growth, just as an incredible CTO architects your technology infrastructure?

Growth Architect

And thus, after that long walk down memory lane, I’ve started to consider that your organization must constantly be asking itself how it is architecting it’s own growth. Let’s consider again New York.

It’s easy to reach the conclusion that the stratum is affecting the height of skyscrapers between the heights of the city; in between those two parts of town that reach to the sky, is a part of Manhattan Island that simply can’t support buildings of such height. But is that all that’s in play? Yes, the groundwork is a significant, perhaps the most significant, consideration for a entrepreneur; the ground is, after all, your market, and the amount of real estate available at that location helps determine how big you can become. In determining where to grow you business, you establish how quickly and significantly you can build. Are you building in the right market?

But that’s hardly the only consideration. The foreman and construction crew, familiar with the technology available, techniques, and resources, might be compared to your technical and product teams. At one time, the size of the skyscrapers there were certainly limited by the strata relative to the technology and techniques available with which to build there. What Coleman and others are pointing out is that that technology, for business, is evolving so rapidly, that what was once impossible is now possible; keeping up with that evolution, is almost impossible and certainly so for any one, traditional skillset. Where once a building could only reach 15 stories, now it might go to 50 – the technology has changed to enable greater heights.

As your building grows, so do your needs for interior design, maintenance, and repairs. In a sense, your customer service, support, and account management capabilities as a business. No one will pay for a building that doesn’t suit their needs, appeal to their taste, and ultimately, work. As buildings run down, finding themselves dilapidated, so too, quickly, go businesses as leaders become satisfied with what they have, happy with their recurring revenue through tenants that merely hang on because the cost of moving to a new building is too great. But over time, that building starts to crumble and it’s eventually abandoned – that is, without interior design, maintenance, and repairs; without world class customer service, support, and account management.

And no amount of commercial brokers and realtors can force people into a building that’s insufficient. Sales, can’t move your product or service if these former considerations aren’t completely understood, supported, and optimized. The job of the realtor is to find a tenant but if your business, your building, is sub-par, falling apart, or poorly designed, you are wasting money on a resource that can’t efficiently deliver.

Combined with on site security, your maintenance and real estate departments serve as business analytics; constantly informing you of the building and helping you optimize, evolve, and maximize revenue therein. Who would dare to invest in a building that reaches to the sky without such things?? Astoundingly, business owners do it all the time.

So the CEO, the business owner, is responsible for this right? Not at all; well… perhaps. Donald Trump is hardly the architect of Trump Tower (does he still own that??) – but he is the visionary, the public face, intrinsic to the brand and culture affiliated with that building. He’s not the architect, nor should be the CEO; but I suppose he is responsible isn’t he? His is the job of finding, hiring, and retaining the incredible individuals who help that building reach it’s heights and make it work. The architect, I’d offer, is the CMO.

Your CMO must be a Growth Architect

Building architecture starts with a fundamental understanding of the stratum. What can be built, where, how, and with what. Marketers who excel, are those that understand that marketing begins with such a solid foundation and that organizations scale by optimizing all of these considerations while leveraging the human resources on which growth is dependent. No building goes up with a foreman alone, and yet, entrepreneurs, particularly technology companies, do just that all the time – the CTO is building something without an architect and the CEO is driving the vision, excitement, and direction, without a blueprint. An architect’s partner is indeed the foreman; as someone who can interpret the vision and make the best use of their own experience, that of the team, and the available resources to design a business that can grow to exceptional heights, only as partners with the foreman can that be accomplished. Beschizza, Coleman, and Patel are all pointing out that in building, one simply does not work without the other; so why do businesses try?

The role of an architect is to completely understand not just the stratum and technology with which to build, but the role that Sales, Designers, and intelligence will play in optimizing the building (er… your business). More than that though, an architect knows the surroundings and infrastructure of a business. To extend the building analogy, an architect knows that designing a building in New York, that looks like it should exist in Southeast Asia, will have a certain impact. More importantly, the architect knows how the wind conditions, temperature, weather, roads, available parking, and other external forces will affect the design of the building. Your building also has plumbing, electricity, and other operational needs that affect how tenants (your consumers) will experience the building – are you able to retain them, are they excited by the building because it uses green energy instead of pulling from the grid, does the building have a high Net Promoter Score and word of mouth?

With those inputs, your growth architect designs the vision and plan for your growth; helping direct how to deploy those technology and human resources on behalf of your scale. Such an architect helps put the building in front of the right planners, public relations professionals, and media outlets to create awareness and excitement and puts the technology (the foreman) and vision (CEO) in the right places to extend the impact of that plan.

And what of Advertising?? Doesn’t a marketer do that? How is that different?? Advertising for tenants or customers is just that – ads in the local trade magazines, a sign in the lobby showing that office space is available, some direct marketing to realtors to help fill the vacant space. Advertising doesn’t build a 50 story building, it only helps fill it if you have a significant building worth filling.

And at the end of the day, an architect doesn’t just help the building grow tall, the architect helps secure investors who are, well, investors in this analogy… money is money people. There are tremendous benefits to having the right investors, sophisticated capital, or connected cash; regardless, who in their right might would try to design and build a building without an architect?? How many investors have told you to go pound the stratum because you don’t have any plans from an architect to validate that what you’re vision is realistic and that you have a plan to ensure that 50 story building doesn’t tumble to the ground?

Good marketers fill buildings. Great marketers design buildings that are taller than thought possible by knowing how the available technology, resources, and people can turn a 15 story building into one that’s 50.

Growing vs. Scaling Business

The same analogy can be drawn from almost anything that grows. The great trees of Marin County, just north of Silicon Valley can only exist there, where the market dynamics exist for the seeds planted to truly grow.

Pick up a Saguaro cactus from Arizona and move it to Texas (where cartoons of old often implied they could be found), and at best, it will wither, shrivel, and in surviving, be a pale comparison of what those plants should be when their roots are established in the right place, with the right resources, and the ideal atmosphere for them to excel.

In thinking through the tree comparison, it occurs to me that there are a couple catch-22s that many many technology companies fail to appreciate. Businesses like Facebook, Foursquare, Highlight, and WhatsApp are great examples of ventures that depend on ubiquity. Market adoption drives the value of their user experience.

Ask yourself if your user experience is dependent on users or providers. The design, layout, and benefits of the business may indeed be compelling but if, at the end of the day, it works only if all my friends use it (or enough merchants are there that it is meaningful), you have a tremendous road to climb.

In the context of buildings, consider the financial centers of the world, the trade centers, or even embassy’s. On their own, they don’t function or create value for our economy nearly as well as the buildings that exist throughout the world – there is an embassy in every city, a trade center in every economy; each enabling the others to leverage their ubiquity to create value. Consider instead buildings with a specific purpose; you can build a water treatment plant anywhere you want but if you then have to also build a waterway or pipes from the source of water to the plant; what exactly are you building?

The fundamental point I’m hoping to explore with you is that growth architecture isn’t about getting you customers, more revenue, or even merely growing. Businesses can always grow by doing that. The question is how you architect your business so that it can scale to new heights; so that a foundation laid for a 50 story building, indeed can be a 50 story building. Filling it is easy; have you given your business the ceiling in which to grow?

The Way We Work is Evolving

The culmination of these ideas stems from a recent exploration of how and where we work, and how that’s changing. I found this recent Facebook post, via Reddit, incredibly amusing, and a simple point of validation that the pace at which technology is changing, is enabling us to do more, build higher, and scale faster but, at the cost of leaving many behind who simply can’t keep up.

The Future of Work

Through my work with space (work spaces, coworking, incubators, accelerators, etc.), it’s become clear to me that not only is the way we work evolving but that where we work is the very foundation of this shift.

A few years ago, Jeff Brenman, founder of Apollo Ideas, and oDesk, put together this tremendous presentation about how the way we work is drastically changing. The slides practically speak for themselves and certainly affirm the idea while validating many of my points above.

Understanding the Way We Work so you can Architect Your Growth

Or, damn Paul, this could have been a much shorter article
(I wasn’t sure which way to go with the title this section)

Why make so many mind-warping leaps between buildings and trees and foundations and stratum?

I was moved to write so much after piecing together all of these disparate ideas and events but ultimately, it comes full circle to the idea that a CTO and CMO must be conjoined at the hip.

In your economy, in your city, in your business, does that effectively happen? Probably not. And it isn’t just a cultural or knowledge based distinction between those two individuals; no, our entrepreneurial society has grown up establishing the idea that tech and marketing are polar opposites – that tech founders don’t need marketing; that marketers can hire developers… SEO after all, something that affects web development and site performance, is a marketers job. it’s all hogwash.

The true growth architect, the person who will build the companies of the future, is that person who has already blended technology and marketing into one. And the only ventures with a shot at success today are those that understand how to architect their growth for scale and success tomorrow.

And it’s through our evolution of how and where we work that we’ll bring about this change. If your community draws an invisible line in the sand, sorry, the stratum, between business and technology, it’s no wonder your developers, engineers, and technology visionaries never connect with the marketing, sales, and business development leaders who help ideas grow. The building that fosters collaboration, teaching and demanding an appreciation of these very principles, is the one where innovation happens; and the foundation for growth of a building, the architecture, is not just an analogy for scale but the cornerstone of your own venture.

Not long ago, I explored those very ideas with the International Association of Science Parks and the City of Austin in considering how we architect our future through space. Fundamentally, the presentation was about fostering innovation and collaboration through space. Ultimately, it was about putting these people and skills together to make magic happen, through building:

The days of a marketer simply getting you customers or running ad programs are dead; unless you’re satisfied with a small building that’s doing just fine but will probably be dilapidated in 5 years. Most business owners are satisfied, and call my bluff if you aren’t in the same position I am in talking with them; I have shades of that Facebook conversation all the time: “Wait this calls for even more questions… you know now that we can do X right?”

Stop merely acquiring customers and trying to figure out and keep up with what works; start architecting your future.

It’s easy to see why companies are moving here. Aside from those economic benefits, while most of the world wrestles with 8 months of cold weather, Austin has only a few months, in the summer, where the weather is overwhelming, so we all spend it in the water.

But why should the world be working with Austin?

Having been here for merely a couple years, it’s clear that Austin is attractive to businesses from not only all over the U.S. but internationally. Events like the Austin Grand Prix and the South by Southwest Conference and Festival bring in guests from all over the world. Central Texas currently has nine different Foreign Trade Zones as well as International Trade Services.

As cities around the world become increasingly expensive and prohibitive to innovation, only places like Austin, where we’re poised to accommodate and encourage growth, economically situated to encourage taking the risk it takes to create industry, fully investigating and embracing how to scale globally, efficiently, and attracting the best talent from around the world to consider Austin home.

Fostering Collaboration Among Global Innovation Hubs

In April, Austin will host innovators from around the world for the 2013 North American Division Workshop looking into the the role of science cities, areas of innovation, and technology and research Parks with the International Association of Science Parks and Areas of Innovation (IASPs).

Leading up to the global conference in October in Brazil, the April event will bring together the resources of the City of Austin, the Texas Entrepreneur Network, the State of Texas, and IASP’s first Science City to explore opportunities for international collaboration between global innovation hubs, observe a funding forum with pitches to Austin investors, and, of course, listen to local music!

Companies located in IASP member parks have the opportunity at the event to participate in a Funding Forum to pitch their company to Austin investors. Five companies will each have the opportunity to give a ten minute pitch for funding followed by investor Q&A from the audience including angel and venture capitalists, private equity, and family offices. Companies seeking $250,000 to $2,000,000 in funding are invited to submit a one-page Executive Summary – there is no submission fee, but applicants chosen to present will pay $125. In addition to the five presenters, two applicants will be chosen as alternates. This forum will be organized by the Texas Entrepreneur Network. At their past funding forums, on average ½ of the companies presenting receive follow-up meetings and 1/5 receive funding. Email natalie.betts@austintexas.gov for an application now (they’re due March 6th!). To register for the IASP workshop, click here.

Validating Austin as the International Hub

So why work WITH Austin, rather than simply in Austin? I started pointing out that SXSW is upon us, and so I will close. The world is looking to Austin; and the work that Mirko Whitfield, SXSW’s lead in Europe & Int’l Business Development, and the City of Austin are doing is exceptional this year…

March 8th, Enterprise Ireland and Innovation Ireland are hosting Mr. Richard Bruton, T.D., Ireland’s Minister for Jobs, Enterprise & Innovation, to introduce Ireland as a trading partner with Austin’s entrepreneurs. Through the 12th, the Borough of Hackney in London, will be hosting a Hackney House at 119 West 6th, with events including an opening party with Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell, a forum on opportunities for Austin companies at London’s Digital Shoreditch festival, and showcases of London companies. Sounds a bit like an embassy of entrepreneurship and as Austin is the epicenter of collaborative work spaces, we shouldn’t be the least bit surprised when the Hackney House is an incredible success for both communities. The experiences at the Hackney House are free and open for registration.

More than that, the night of the 8th caps an all day seminar at Austin’s City Hall, for the over 12 foreign delegations attending SXSW to gain insight on how to effectively do business in the US.  Speakers throughout the seminar include Gemma Craven, Executive Vice President and NY lead at Social@Ogilvy, Aziz Gilani, partner DFJ Mercury, Harper Reed, Founder of Harper Rules LLC and ex-CTO Obama Campaign, Robert Scoble, Start-Up Liason Officer at Rackspace, Saidah Nash Carter, is Vice Presdent of Strategy and Business Innovation at Thomson Reuters, and Jason Seats, Managing Director of TechStars Cloud.

The “Doing Business in the USA” reception from 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. is Cosponsored by ChinWag, the focal point for global digital media practitioners. Austin entrepreneurs and over 150 international companies are invited by the city to RSVP to the reception to speak with international companies about our experiences in Austin and why the world should work with Austin.

Perhaps most exciting about the SXSW conference is that world is in Austin for a few days.  Keeping up with everything going on, not just internationally but throughout the distinct conference events, parties, and opportunities is a challenge. The kind of challenge to which Austin rises; Austin based innovators are on the bleeding edge of the technology that will make your experience in Austin exceptional.  Whether the work of CanWe Studios and their CanWeNetwork app, Next One’s On Me and their app that will make it easy to treat a new contact to their next drink in town, the exciting possibility of FoTacts which will change the way you meet, for the first time, or the quintessentially Austin D.W.M.C. (which you’ll need with all the cars in town), their success, their ideas, are evidence of what’s possible with Austin, and why SXSW, this year, seems to me to be kicking off the fact that global innovation is about to explode through Austin.

At the end of the day, every city, every community, has a unique set of market dynamics that make things work within that micro-economy. We have distinct cultures, experiences, resources, priorities, markets, and systems of education, and our job as entrepreneurs, as people, is to work within the dynamics of our market.

Challenging the macro economy (the economy or your state or country) is that we try to learn by example. Cities see something that works elsewhere and tries to replicate it, presuming that what works there, will work here. If the University system is heavily involved in a successful community, it can easily be presumed that getting the University system engaged in your community will drive the same success. Incubators are incredibly effective and invaluable in some cities, you must need them in yours. If you’re local economy doesn’t have enough Venture Capitalists, you must foster VC funding as that’s how startups are funded… isn’t it?? No. It isn’t that simple. Various dynamics enable one slice of an economy to have the impact that it does and as your community has different dynamics, what’s good for the goose isn’t necessarily good for the gander.

There is though, one market dynamic that I’ve come to believe is exceptional to Silicon Valley and would indeed, significantly, benefit every other entrepreneurial environment, if we were to learn by example and work toward fostering the same in our respective cities.

The Role of the News Media

Over the past decade, we’ve had a revolutionary shift in how we consume news; and no, I’m not talking about the death of print and the paper as our use of technology has replaced how we consume the news. The shift has been more subtle, more nuanced, and it affects our expectation of the media and affinity to traditional news brands.

With the rise of the Portal (Yahoo), RSS (blogs), Google (search), Twitter (social media), and Facebook (our communities), we’ve arrived at a point where we can know everything, immediately, on demand, and in detail. I’ve intentionally tried to stage the evolution of technology there in the order which we’ve experienced it. Yahoo (really, AOL first, I suppose), set the expectation that we can go to one place for far more information than any single media brand was capable of providing before then. RSS technology (and everything that came along with it), gave us the ability to aggregate everything, shifting some of the control of information FURTHER from a single brand (i.e. the newspapers), to a single brand aggregating many sources (Yahoo), to the ability to aggregate what we want. Google gave us even more personal control, timely news on demand, and finally, because of their index, an exceptional jump in the comprehensiveness of coverage. But Google didn’t have everything. Twitter opened our worlds next, truly, to citizen journalism. While the blog enabled people to write, it really took Twitter to teach the world that we could follow the news of any one, any where, any time. The fire hose that was Twitter though, frankly, gave further rise to the already-existing Facebook as we revolted against too much, saying, “I only want to follow the news of my friends, family, and peers.”

Through that evolution we learned that the role of the media is to inform us of everything, on our terms.

In 2008, The New York Times reported that “newspapers and magazines do not have an audience problem — newspaper Web sites are a vital source of news, and growing — but they do have a consumer problem.” Times reporter continued, “Stop and think about where you are reading this column. If you are one of the million or so people who are reading it in a newspaper that landed on your doorstop or that you picked up at the corner, you are in the minority. This same information is available to many more millions on this paper’s Web site, in RSS feeds, on hand-held devices, linked and summarized all over the Web.” A year later, The Chronicle of Higher Education shared, “During our most recent conversation, James Traub, a distinguished journalist who writes for The New York Times, noted that what most worries him about the current state of journalism is the dwindling support for lengthy investigations that lead to in-depth articles on complicated issues. The goal of higher education is, among other things, to prepare people to become responsible and productive citizens. Without serious journalists who are free to do their jobs thoroughly and carefully, democratic society as we have known it cannot survive.” Let me be clear that I’m not trying to be critical of the news media brands but there clearly is an epidemic in the industry and it’s one that has been plaguing the industry for a decade. The question is, what do we do about it?

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism indeed found, in 2012…

New research released in this report finds that mobile devices are adding to people’s news consumption, strengthening the lure of traditional news brands and providing a boost to long-form journalism. Eight in ten who get news on smartphones or tablets, for instance, get news on conventional computers as well. People are taking advantage, in other words, of having easier access to news throughout the day – in their pocket, on their desks and in their laps.

At the same time, a more fundamental challenge that we identified in this report last year has intensified — the extent to which technology intermediaries now control the future of news.

They want on, “A year ago, we wrote here: ‘The news industry, late to adapt and culturally more tied to content creation than engineering, finds itself more a follower than leader shaping its business.’”

The News That’s Fit To Print

You see the attempts by the media to evolve to meet this changing expectation. The rise of the 24 hour news cycle with CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and other news stations, is evident of our demand for always accessible news. Print media, unable to update itself constantly, didn’t die as we moved from consuming through a piece of paper to a laptop, it died (it’s dying) because it continues to fail to meet that consumer expectation – even online, print news favors the stories of old rather than the timely and comprehensive coverage we demand today. When I look to my local news source, I expect to have everything going on locally; it’s role is not to determine what’s news, that’s my role. Instead of working to fulfill that expectation and sustain their brand, print continue to make laughable mistakes; creating digital versions of their traditional newspaper, as though digital means we really just want to consume the good old newspaper on an iPad in a way that we can turn the pages.

While I’m being harshly critical of some news brands’ ability to change, there have been incredible success stories; notably from Silicon Valley where technology comes first. It’s in their success stories that we find the real crux of the challenge in our new expectations of news. In our demand for a brand to cover everything, please appreciate that I’m not saying it’s the news media’s fault (not entirely anyway) – it’s nearly impossible for a single brand to be aware of and cover everything. While the traditional, corporate, organized entity for reporting can be broadcast 24/7, it’s impossible for a few employed reporters to possibly report all the news.

But it’s not impossible for technology to accomplish that.

Rather, it’s not impossible for those who understand the role that technology played in evolving our expectations of the news media – in shifting our demand from that of in-depth, quality reporting, to comprehensive coverage on our terms, to evolve. Technologies, such as those powering Techmeme or Paper.li show us that it’s possible to meet our expectations technically. Techcrunch and VentureBeat show us that it’s possible for traditional news reporting brands to evolve. How? Look to how communities socialize business.

The Driving Force in Socializing Startups

Just a couple months ago, Gordon Daugherty, Austin angel investor and Director of Capital Factory’s developing accelerator, remarked that the PR industry is going through a transformation as startups conclude that they don’t really need it, “since they can use social media channels instead.”

He’s not wrong in saying that we don’t need traditional PR but let’s not confuse that by thinking that we don’t need the media.

The fact that PR stands for “public relations” causes people to think a particular way but shouldn’t confuse the key purpose and intent of the function: to get important messages out to important constituents,” added Daugherty. “In the old days this typically centered on press releases and media pitching to get coverage in various types of print publications.”

What we need is for the media to evolve with our changing expectations. The way to do that, is to open the doors to your community’s marketing channels. So first ask yourself, does your community really have a local marketing channel?

What makes Techcrunch so pervasive, and the coverage of an entrepreneurial market such as Silicon Valley so in depth, is that the entire startup economy in California is driven by marketers. Bear with me a sec, I hear you asking, “but aren’t they internet and technology companies??” Indeed they are, but distinct about Silicon Valley relative to other communities is the early, prioritized investment in growth and marketing. Where other communities hire marketing expertise only after they’ve figured out how to make money with a venture, Silicon Valley puts marketing talent in the earliest stages of a team; often, marketing is the 4th or 5th hire in a business. And that, changes the entire dynamic of the local economy.

“But we can’t afford marketing”

Such a foreign concept that thought is to many experienced marketers, that many communities are in a death spiral when it comes to entrepreneurship. Without marketers, ventures aren’t effectively positioned, traction easily attainable these days, is lost, too little capital is raised, and local industries remain fractured and nascent. You can’t afford not to invest in marketing as marketers don’t sell your paid web service or run Adwords to get you white paper downloads, anyone with a budget can do that. Marketers evangelize industries, help create value and equity leading to capital, get early traction for entrepreneurs without having to learn or question how, and position ventures in such a way that the world cares. Such marketers don’t engage a community where they aren’t supported or prioritized and without such marketers, the entrepreneurs in such a community are doomed to languish (or get outpaced by entrepreneurs in other economies), because they languish, they can’t afford good marketers – the death spiral.

What do you get when you have marketers penetrating every venture in a market? What do you get when businesses employ individuals who talk, sell, network, and toot their own horn? What do you get when the individuals who can do PR, as well as social media, blogging, SEO, advertising, and branding and messaging in their sleep are part of the fabric of your community? When they are vested and invested in your business??

Frankly, marketers who are all a little egotistical…

You get talked about. You get socialized. And the media, the evolving news media, recognizing and appreciating that consumers demand comprehensive coverage, talks about you; not because you are a story they like or think their readers will like, but because you are news – and in the noise that exists in a community, marketers help you rise above the noise so that those who cover the news comprehensively, know to cover you.

Don’t get me wrong, PR and demand gen experts have been working closely together for a long time. But with social media marketing having one leg in each camp, some companies will struggle to decide how they want to organize and/or how they want to go about using agencies and freelancers.” adds Daugherty. “If you’re a startup or early stage company, this doesn’t matter very much because you’ll have very limited resources (in-house or outsourced) that will need to wear multiple marketing hats anyway.”

Why you can’t afford not to invest in marketing

What I fear many fail to realize is that the exploding pace of entrepreneurship and the… what’s bigger than exploding?… pace of innovation and technology means that moving quickly and efficiently to scale your business isn’t about your success, it’s about avoiding your failure. I assure you, whatever great idea you have for a venture, a small business, a technology, an innovation, someone else is doing it too. As new businesses try to conserve funds by learning how to grow their businesses on their own, elsewhere, the entrepreneurs with similar ideas realize that marketers define product roadmaps, development priorities, create stories, and identify marketing channels by knowing your market and having the experience to put you there, effectively and immediately. While you’re learning, they’re going to market.

What I know is that the news media must evolve if we’re to adapt (return) local communities to the more entrepreneurial economy we once had in the United States. As news brands grasp the significance that comprehensive coverage has on a community, as they appreciate that our expectations are indeed that they cover a greater breadth of news, they must rely on that community that is socializing everything if they hope to remain aware of what’s going on.

Many have explored how and if the traditional PR agency can fill this role; whether or not the PR firm can effectively play in this new era of growth hacking, in which your organization must understand and leverage the synergy that’s created in content marketing, SEO, social media, PR, and conversion optimization as one. Startups and business owners will continue to discover that PR firms have their place, and scaling your venture is not likely it.

Chris Seper CEO of MedCity Media, recognizes these trends and offers that, as with any established business model, incentives must be put in place for the media to change (apparently the loss of news media jobs and erosion of an audience isn’t incentive enough).

It’s common to have reporters, based solely on what interests them, pursue stories that aren’t part of their primary assignment,” shares Chris in a LinkedIn article, Journalists should share in the success (and the risk). “Imagine someone assigned to write about a specific community who is into cooking that starts writing disproportionately about homemade recipes by local residents versus issues facing the local government. That’s a real example, by the way, and it dilutes the quality of a product.”

Every journalism job, he suggests, should have a bonus structure in which a reporter’s total compensation is based off benchmarks that consider the amount of traffic they bring to the brand. Reporters can and should continue to cover news that interests and appeals to them; certainly, they must (if not they then who?) continue to do in depth reporting, but news media hopefully also appreciate that their consumers, our economies and entrepreneurs, need more breadth of coverage.

Consider your local economy and ask yourself if you are aware of the incredible health care, manufacturing, mobile, ecommerce, video game, or venture capital industries that exist there. I’m sure you know how great it is to live and work in your city but do you really know why? Imagine what would happen to your economy if your stories were shepherded by marketers who know how to expose and get traffic for those stories, to a local and national news media that understands the value of that traffic, and what that would mean to business where you live and work.

Here’s a simple truth about any small business or startup. Facebook advertising works. So does search engine marketing. And email, you can do that too. Does your strategy account for content marketing and SEO? Of course it does. Perhaps direct mail? Sure, it’s old fashioned, but it works. The simple truth is that any amount of money allocated to any marketing channel will work. When fund raising, modeling that you intend to acquire customers through said channels, requiring X amount of money, is about as experienced as saying that you intend to put up a blog through WordPress. Duh. Your sophistication as an entrepreneur does not come across in referring to lead gen, advertising, and marketing channels as the means of growing your business. But to be frank, that lack of sophistication is equally apparent in the person asking the question.

So where do entrepreneurs and investors usually turn in exploring more creative marketing techniques? “We’re going to get featured in the iTunes store.” “Our developers have a creative integration with Facebook to increase word of mouth through viral marketing.” “We plan to target the largest industry blogs and we’ll even pay for great reviews.” “We have a launch plan for SXSW.” “We’re introducing the app to the community at the upcoming demo day.”

Of course you are.

Entrepreneurs Need to Remove Barriers to Growth

If the fundamentals of marketing your startup aren’t ingrained in the DNA of your culture, you’re already off to a rough start. You can’t hire an email marketing professional to put your startup on the map – well, you can, but you’ll get as far as email marketing alone will get you and you are merely paying for the privilege of growth. Your job, as the cofounder, CTO, CEO, lead developer, customer service manager, designer, business development consultant, or team mascot (does that cover everyone on a startup team?), is to eliminate the barriers to scale.

• If your app depends on retail partners or merchants to be compelling for users, figure out how to sign up thousands such that they don’t expect traffic or results from the partnership. How can you possibly, efficiently, acquire users AND merchants at the same time?
• Invest in exceptional user experience and design as an audience passionate about your product or service is the audience that pays off in dividends, drives PR, and spreads the word. If you’ve failed to foster a passionate audience, or worse, don’t know if you have one or what it’s going to take to get one, you’ve failed period.
• Are you clear about who, why, and how users remain engaged and are you fostering that engagement?  You can pay to acquire millions of users but if they use it once and are done, you’re done.
• Do you have a technology that gets better when other users are on the platform?  Does it depend on users before the app is compelling for anyone?  Figure out how to make it work for me regardless of others being there!

THIS is what marketing does for your venture. Your marketer(s) must be responsible for keeping the organization focused on eliminating barriers to scale. More than anyone else in the organization, they should understand how to evaluate the impact of any marketing activity holistically, frankly, anything that touches your audience, and be held to an expectation of efficiency in growth – not the performance of any particular program.

Growth Hacking

Who doesn’t love a good Venn diagram?  Sean Johnson, partner at Digital Intent and organizers of the Chicago Growth Hacker meetup whipped up the simplest representation of how (or rather who) is capable of having this kind of impact on your organization. In looking at this diagram, ask yourself if you are hiring marketers, developers, or those that can capably play a role in both.

“There are two primary reasons startups fail. The first is they create a product no one cares about, a solution that doesn’t meet a need for a large enough market. This is a problem the Lean Startup movement has been working to solve,” shares Sean. “The second problem is they don’t know how to get customers. While they probably pay attention to traffic, the number of users who sign up, and the amount of revenue they generate, it’s likely they don’t know what happens in between. And even if they do, it’s likely they aren’t sure what to do about it.”

Traditional Marketers, the likes of which most people hire, serve customer growth, adoption, awareness, traffic, and other business metrics classically associated with reach or the size of your market. If you hire a good one, you’ll benefit from a holistic approach to marketing and an understanding of the impact everything you do has on your reach. More often than not though, entrepreneurs hire direct marketers who focus on sales, leads, and an inappropriately defined end-goal for your market – the point of conversion.

Growth is Easy, Hacking Scale is Hard

Growth hackers are constantly seeking ways to increase acquisition, adoption, retention, revenue, and referral. These pirates are rigorous in their use of data and methodology to determine what will scale the business and remove barriers to your success. Most importantly, they aren’t afraid to fail and they leverage their breadth of experience to ensure an efficient use of your resources. Their audience, the audience they can reach, is already millions of times greater than yours as they know how to use technology to reach everyone appropriate to your business and they add value to your organization by demanding that the team appreciate that your web service, your product, or your app, is the most valuable marketing tool.

There is an important appreciation in what Sean Johnson shared with regard to the Lean Startup, “There are two primary reasons startups fail. The first is they create a product no one cares about, a solution that doesn’t meet a need for a large enough market. This is a problem the Lean Startup movement has been working to solve.” He continues that, “The second problem is they don’t know how to get customers.” In finding creative solutions to ensure your scale, and in understanding the breadth of your market, point of conversion, monetization strategy, and reach of your product given the quality and innovation inherent in your product, the best growth hackers recognize that Lean can fall short of big ideas.

“Maybe the reason we don’t have big ideas is because our entire approach to building them is sometimes so frugal with time, money, and belief,” shared Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman in his encouragement of us to appreciate the need for building out the Maximum Beautiful Product, “Lean startup techniques have revolutionized how we build software, but the lean startup has also turned a startup’s only initial asset – the conviction that an idea will work — into a villain rather than the hero. This is why we so often see startups pivot rather than persevere.”

The problem many are exploring in the fanatic dedication to Lean is that it isn’t always the best way to scale innovative, market changing, technologies. Is your team removing such barriers to your success or are you still chasing or discarding ideas without a complete understanding of your market opportunity? Your experience with investors is likely telling.

Your Story or Growth with Investors

If you sell widgets at $10 a pop with a $2 margin, and your conversion rate is 10%, then the answer to the question of how you will grow can be as simple as any way in which you can get 100 clicks at $2 per click. When you’ve saturated that channel, you’ll find another. You need $1M dollars in financing as you’ve determined that there are 500,000 potential customers in said market. Of course, it’s not that simple but sales based marketing is merely math so when it comes time to the story of your marketing plans, a strategy as simple as some marketing channels and a budget, doesn’t impress.

Exceptional marketing takes place, or rather well known startups engage and invest in marketing, before any sizable fund raising.

Unfortunately, far too many investors have taken to avoiding risk by encouraging entrepreneurs to monetize their business first. Personally, such advice is a cop-out from just saying no, you have a terrible idea and I’m not going to fund it but not because it’s a soft no and, indeed, encourages an entrepreneur to figure out how to make money; rather, because, in helping eliminate risk, the entrepreneur now focuses on monetization and usually, as a result, limits marketing (growth) to that simple math.  Don’t misunderstand me, early revenue streams are not a problem and shouldn’t be discouraged, rather, the advice to monetize first and grow later is thrown about like candy and it trains a culture, an economy, to believe that monetization is the path to success.

Ever wonder why Facebook struggled with how to make money for so long?  More, that they didn’t have Facebook Ads in the early days??  They solved for scale first and you certainly can’t fault them for it.  The challenge in doing anything but solving for scale first is that innovations, incredible new technologies the likes of which we’re creating online, don’t have clear markets.   While your market validation at the stage you’re at might reveal that there are indeed 500,000 people who want what you’re doing, there are far more who have no idea that your technology is even possible, plausible, or available. Your focus on acquiring those customers because they are out there and you know how to pay to get them not only limits the size and scope of your business but it short-sells your story with potential investors.  If you heed the advice to monetize too early OR with a solution that stifles growth, THAT becomes your market.  An investor hearing that you are going to acquire said customers through a channel anyone with a budget can penetrate will (and should) say no to you.

Of course you can acquire those 500,000 potential customers; what are you doing to remove the barriers to acquiring everyone?

As part of the announcement, BlindOx, LLC, which owned and operated the Cospace coworking space, announced the closure of the space and the end to one of Austin’s original and most iconic coworking brands.

I am very proud of the positive impact Cospace coworking has had in the startup community.”, said Kirtus Dixon, Managing Partner of BlindOx LLC, owner/operator of the Cospace coworking space. “I will be eternally grateful for all of our customers and colleagues, some of who gave of themselves without any expectation of return. It’s been a great run.”

In the past few months, the new, virtual Cospace has grown to serve over 1,000 spaces throughout the United States and is connecting nearly 100,000 professionals, each month, with the ideal work space.

The tangible significance of coworking is that people working in a shared environment, collaborate. Getting out of the home, and into such a work space, fosters business development, job placement, partnerships, and new ideas. The key to economic development is in helping people with skills find the space in which their talent has the most demand. Cospace.co is focused on matching what you do and what you want to do, with the environment in which you are most likely to meet others with whom you can succeed.

Space owners, operators, and investors are encouraged to list their space with Cospace and leverage the extensive community of entrepreneurs seeking the right work environment.