We are interested in knowing what you think.

This is likely a loaded question, but what does it have to do with data?  Consider this.

Social engagement tools like Yammer have over 2,000 teams created in them each day. Enterprise applications like Salesforce help contribute to over 150 million conversations between businesses and customers worldwide each day.  One billion files are saved to storage providers like DropBox every three days.   The average number of email messages received in 2012 was 5,579 and average messages sent, 869.

There are massive amounts of data flowing in, out and through the enterprise and thee systems are bloated silos of data with their own files, comments and conversations.  There’s so much data that users are spending more than half their time each day gathering information – and the information they find lacks the context and relevancy needed to make smart decisions.   It’s “data fat”.

Not the “fat” you thought I meant? Trust me, it can be just as unwieldy.

Husband replies, I don’t think it’s the dress honey.

So how do employees cut through the loads of  “fat data” to determine which data is “the muscle” – the meaningful stuff?   How do users make well-informed business decisions without having to sift through hundreds of emails, files, and digital conversations across numerous systems and applications?

 Enter the Miracle Weight Loss Cure . . . for Data

At Skyence, we trim the fat from the data that employees use everyday in three steps:  1) Find, filter and digest information, 2) wrap the human context around the data to create more intelligent data and 3) publish and share that intelligence across the enterprise.  By cutting out the fat, users can leverage the most relevant information to make smarter, timelier decisions.

While the world is espousing the value of ridiculous amounts of  “big data”,  Skyence is starting down in the trenches with the business user and tearing down the data silos to uncover the value trapped in the data they use every day.

Brian Solis says it best, “….by investing in human capital to make sense of would be ominous data, organizations can modernize the role of business intelligence to introduce a human touch.” He further states, “Big data is just that….big data.”

Let’s face it – it’s the New Year. As every diet product and fitness center is explaining on every channel in America “now’s the time to slim down”, we believe it’s time for business users to take control of their data, trim the data fat and make smarter decisions.

If the Lincolns can handle it (see the clip below), we think you can too:

"You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with." - John Rohn

Recently, I read an article from Entrepreneur magazine about the 5 Mentors Every Entrepreneur Should Have. I loved this article for a number of reasons. I’ve talked with so many entrepreneurs over the last year that seem hell bent on “going it alone”. They spend so much time heads down, focused on their company, that they fail to get out of the building and talk to anyone. I’m a huge fan of both tenacity and experience, but I think recognition that you don’t know everything is a tenant of a successful company.

The Entrepreneur Magazine took a different perspective on surrounding yourself with smart people. Their premise outlined five personal relationships that you should make sure to have at your disposal. These include:

1.  A friend that knew you before you started your own thing
2.  A person with your similar skill set at your point of learning
3.  A colleague you don’t love working with
4.  A person with exactly the opposite skills than yours
5.  A friend who always knew you’d be an entrepreneur

Personally, I’ve been pretty good at surrounding myself with a good network, but I have to admit that I’ve never considered #3 and #4. I think it’s human nature to surround yourself with like minded people, so I really like the idea of “stretching” myself and getting out of the comfort zone.

While thinking about this list I also added a couple of people to it. These represent relationships that have expanded my thinking or helped me think through some of the hard problems that have popped up during the Skyence journey.

A person at your peer level in a completely different industry

I have a friend that runs a sign business, pretty much the farthest thing from cloud based computing as you can get. Yet my interactions with him dramatically change my way of thinking on a number of fronts. When we first started meeting for coffee, it was with the premise of understanding how his industry might benefit from our product, but it quickly evolved into me learning how his industry operated and how I could apply those techniques to our business. I walked into those first meetings thinking about how boring a sign company could be. I’ve since walked out understanding how he grew it to a $4 million dollar business. Different perspectives are good for business.

A typical consumer of your business

As a CEO with a product background, I’ve logged thousands of miles and hundreds of hours of meetings with “end users”, yet I still find them to be super beneficial and not just from a company product perspective. There is something subliminal that soaks into you when you have constant contact with end users. This is especially true when you’re just having small talk, and not focused on product or research. I find that I generally have my best epiphanies after these types of meetings. Hearing people talk casually, about non-product related topics, really gives you a feel for who they are as individuals and their day to day challenges that you’ll never deduce from surveys or metrics.

In my previous post I summarized the article with

“So get out there and meet people. Attend local start up events, reach out via LinkedIn, talk to bloggers. This type of information doesn’t just show up in your inbox, you have to work for it.“

While this all holds true, I’ll append it to include an expanded mentor network as well. There are amazing and talented people all around you. Seek them out and build relationships. And don’t forget to offer yourself up to others as well. Who knows where on the list you’ll fall, or who you’ll impact with your wisdom.

April and I have known Denise for over a decade, going back to our days at Motive. Denise helped create the amazing marketing momentum (also known as “Thunder Lizard”) that led to Motive’s rapid rise and eventual acquisition by Alcatel-Lucent. I cannot think of anyone else that I’d rather have as part of our team and taking point on our market strategy. Her expertise and sheer determination (as well as her ability to have fun along the way) were deciding factors in Denise joining as a co-founder. Denise’s impact will be felt in Skyence’s culture, mission and success.

Look for some big changes to all things Skyence in the coming months. If you’d like to read more about Denise’s background, check out her executive bio. Denise also has a great blog on guerrilla marketing that I recommend to any company.

When startups have success, it’s much harder to keep that fun, small feeling lifestyle.  One day, you’re 10 people, the next you’re 50 or 100.  I distinctly remember working at a startup a decade ago that went through fast growth.  Over the course of a couple of years, we went from starry eyed startup to 500 people.  Along the way, you could feel the culture change.  At first, you’re walking the halls and you see people you don’t know, then you start to go to meetings with people you don’t know.

So how does this relate to the person I was introduced to?  Well, it’s pretty simple, actually.  Just because your company gets big, you can still act like it’s small.  This person is on the management team of a $10 billion dollar company.  He’s responsible for large teams of people and lots of important things.  But take something as simple as an Out of Office reply:

I don’t know about you, but I’d work for this guy.   This isn’t the typical boring, corporate out of office that we’ve all become used to from Corporate America.  This is a guy that still remembers the small startup that he used to be at, before it was bought by the mother ship.

There’s lots of things you can do to retain culture and inspire people, but I think one of the most important is to not forget your roots. Think small, no matter how big you get.

Source: http://www.visualnews.com

Edit:

As a follow up to this original infographic, I found a really interesting Pinterest from VisualLoop, which you can find here. He/She has done a great job of collecting data based infographics from a number of years and sources.

April and I “grew up” at Motive, with each of us moving through different roles at the company (Tony around product, development, marketing and April around operations, finance and services). We have always held similar beliefs in how business should be done and the critical importance of individual contributors and middle management to the business.

Over the years, we’ve always stayed in touch… always joking about starting something together some day. We knew that one day we’d start a business; a business and culture that had the values that we thought were important, it’s just taken a couple of years to find the right idea.

When I first started Skyence, April was the first person that I asked to be a company advisor. Her huge knowledge base of operations experience and start up know how have been immensely valuable to us as we were getting off the ground. I can’t even start to fathom how many iterations of business models we’ve been through over the last 6 months.

After several months, and many lunches, April started to get as excited about Skyence as we were (also known as the “startup bug”). Ever since we started Skyence, I’ve been pretty tenacious in my quest to convince April to throw her lot in with us. And why wouldn’t I? April has had huge success in growing businesses, all the way from pre-revenue to $50m to $100m run-rate businesses. She has global operational experience, and is a financial genius with integral knowledge of taking products to markets. She’s one of the only operations executives that I’ve ever met that understood the entire product lifecycle, from customer validation to actually selling it.

While the team might be small, just three of us, there’s something amazing about wearing multiple hats and bootstrapping a company. I’m very much looking forward to April’s continued contributions to Skyence. Ask anyone who knows her, and they’ll tell you that her grounded approach to companies, customers and employees is going to make Skyence that much better.

Drop April a line, tell her she’s crazy for joining us. We know she’ll laugh, because we know she’s just as crazy as we are, and that she loves it.

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while, so this question was push for me to write this post.

As you’ve probably read in some of my previous blog posts, I spend a lot of time talking to people.  Over the coarse of this year, I have literally talked to over 300 people with respect to what problem we are trying to solve, who we think has the problem and what value we provide in solving that problem.

Now, 300 people might sound like a lot, but let’s break it down a bit.  When we originally conceived of Skyence, I talked to roughly 50 people about the issues in cloud storage and what challenges they faced.  I walked into those meetings with a hypothesis of what the problems were, who would buy the product and what features they needed to successfully solve those problems.

I was wrong.

Out of those first 50 interviews, I found solid pain points. We validated the problems existed, but more importantly, through the course of those interviews, we found out that our target buyer, IT, didn’t prioritize those problems.  So, while they thought the problems were real, they weren’t enough of a pain point for them to want to pay for it.  If we had built our product without this insight, we would now have a product, but no buyers.

Out of the ashes of those interviews, however, we made course corrections, shifting our idea to be more end user focused. After modifying our hypothesis, we hit the streets again, finding those in our new target audience, testing our new assumptions and asking new questions.

Rinse and Repeat.

I’d like to say that we nailed it on the second iteration, but we didn’t.  We continued to find problems, problems that we could solve, but none that had a high enough value proposition that people were willing to buy the solution.  Like the first set of interviews, we could have stopped at the end, assumed we knew where we went wrong and built what we thought the new, correct answer was.  And just like the first time, we would have a product that solves a problem, but not one that people would buy.

By the time we got to 200 in person interviews we had a lot of data and a lot of insights into a bigger picture.  We understood at a macro level how people used cloud storage, WHY they used cloud storage, how they shared, how the bought services, which services they used and what issues they had.   We came up with a modified hypothesis and tried again.

This time?  We got it right.  We’ve talked to 50 people in the last month.  We’ve found a problem, solution and value statement that is dead on.  We’ve found people that enthusiastically want our product and are willing to pilot it in their companies.  We’ve had pricing discussions and get head nods, “yes, I’d buy that product.”

Building a product is easy.  Building the right product is time consuming and difficult.  The answers you seek are not in the building, they’re out there, locked in day to day trials and tribulations of your potential customers.  Don’t try to talk to 5 people, try to talk to 50 or 500.

Step away from the computer and what you think you know.  The answers are out there, you just have to work to get to them.

Dennis has more than 15 years of experience combating spam, security issues, and improving email delivery through industry policy, ISP relations and technical solutions. As Eloqua’s Chief Privacy Officer, Dayman leverages his experience and key relationships with the major receivers to provide best practices to Eloqua customers and ensure the deliverability and compliance of their communications and data flows. Previously, Dayman worked at StrongMail Systems as the Director of Deliverability, Privacy, and Standards within operations. In that role, he handled all deliverability and privacy issues related to StrongMail customers and made best practice recommendations as StrongMail’s representative to a cross-industry alliance of ESPs, ISPs, online marketers and spam-filtering companies.

You can read more about Dennis at the TechWildeCatter website.

Ross Buhrdorf joined HomeAway five months after the company’s inception and oversees technology, trust and security, hosting, corporate IT, infrastructure and global customer systems. During his tenure at HomeAway he has built the development and engineering team from five to more than 200 global employees. He has been instrumental in integrating multiple technology systems to contribute to the company’s rapid growth.

Prior to joining HomeAway, Buhrdorf worked in the enterprise high IP software business as the Vice President of Engineering and Chief Technology Officer at BetweenMarkets and Salion.com. There he created a development process featured as a case study by Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute and Rational Corporation. Buhrdorf was also formerly Vice President of Engineering at Excite.com where he grew the team from one to more than 200 engineers worldwide, handled multiple acquisitions and drove the “Communities” area of the site from 53,000 to 40 million daily page views, ultimately helping Excite become the fastest-growing company in Silicon Valley in 2000.