It’s simple. “He Who Has the Gold, Makes the Rules.” This timeless quote answers your question, “Why hasn’t he responded to me yet?”

Although many people may understand this conceptually, 75% fail to live by it and ruin their chances for success.  Make no mistake: This ‘Golden Rule’ drives business in and outside of Silicon Valley. Regardless if you are looking for funding, sales leads, a job or just advice, you need to follow these 5 basic rules to be successful.

Rule #1:  Respect Power Dynamics

If YOU WANT something from someone else then THEY HAVE the power.  If you are trying to sell, ask or show, YOU must make the effort.  No one will call you, come to you, or do any work. “He who has the gold gets to be lazy.”

➢ Offer to come to drop by their office at 7 am and bring them a coffee on your way to work.

➢ Be available at odd hours like nighttime. Their free time may be 9pm.

➢ Offer to drive them to the airport.

➢ Offer to call them during their commute time.

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April’s Under the Radar Conference is full of game changing startups!  One of the presenting companies will be Duo Security, who today announced closing a $5 million round from Google Ventures, True Ventures, and Resonant Venture Partners. This brings startup’s total funding to $6 million.  Come and meet Dug Song and his team in person at Under the Radar in less than 2-months!

Company Description: Duo Security’s hosted two-factor authentication service brings strong, scalable security to organizations of any size. Duo’s unique, high-availability architecture provides centralized management, self-service enrollment, and interactive secondary login through an intuitive web interface, eliminating the high costs, complexity, and confusion associated with traditional two-factor systems. Every day, over 500 organizations in 40+ countries around the world rely on Duo for their security. Duo Security is located in Ann Arbor, MI.

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2012 is being touted as the year of Platform as a Service (PaaS).  Many major market research firms are predicting consolidation and increased investment in PaaS. For example, Gartner has reported that the PaaS adoption will increase from 3% to 43% of all enterprises by 2015.

Why the shift?

PaaS is becoming a more viable model as enterprises adopt the cloud computing model. According to Cloudspectator, the largest drivers of PaaS growth are the increasing popularity of web and mobile applications and companies’ need to develop and deploy such solutions fast and cheap.

In an article by eWeek mobile, Dave West, an analyst with Forrester said, “I think that PaaS is a foundation for a major transformation of how people build software…Imagine a world where business-type people, or at least business developer types, assemble their applications from a combination of PaaS and software as a service. This is particularly true for systems of engagement, with a strong focus on the consumption rather than the creation of information. It will be interesting to see how the PaaS vendors shake out in the next year.”

PaaS job listings on Indeed.com serve as proof. PaaS job opportunities began rising steadily in 2008 and are projected to grow exponentially in the future.

Interested in new emerging PaaS companies?  Come to Under the Radar and see companies like AppHarbor, Cabana, Cloudbees, Stackmob, and AppFog present!

Congratulations to Under the Radar alumni Stitch Labs on receiving $1 Million in funding from True Ventures! Stitch Labs will use the funding for product development and customer growth. The company is also hiring new employees. Stitch was founded in 2011 and is based in San Francisco, California. This is the first round of funding the company has received.

See their 2011 Under the Radar presentation HERE.

Company Description | Stitch, a design-focused fully integrated business management suite for the SMB market, was created to solve problems the founders experienced while operating product-based businesses. Stitch integrates inventory management, order fulfillment, invoicing, accounting and business analytics through numerous sales channels (i.e. online, wholesale, consignment, trade shows) into a single SaaS product offering. Near-term development continues to focus on business management tools in addition to incorporating industry-changing integration technologies through both web and mobile applications. Long-term development will fill the void that currently exists between retailers and manufacturers by leveraging network effects and a uniquely designed database.

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Right now companies are inundated with massive sets of real time information.  Petabyte size data comes via Twitter feeds, computer log files, geo-local information, and more.  However, few corporations know how to make actionable business decisions with this type of “Big Data.” A recent Mashable article claimed that only a third of companies in their study had the capacity to turn raw data into anything useful.

This is where a Data Scientist can help.  A Data Scientist is an emerging role that corporations are finding highly valuable to help analyze their information.  Mashable called it the “Career of the Future”

GigaOm wrote about a spike in demand for Data Scientists because “Petabytes of data are useless if no one can make sense of it.”  In fact, after talking to multiple recruiting firms they found that technical engineers can make a 25% salary increase for understanding hadoop architecture and big data analytics.

What Makes a Data Scientist Special?

Many say it’s their ability to create a perfect blend of math and art (in terms of data visualization).

In an interview with Forbes last fall, Monica Rogati, Senior Data Scientist at Linkedin said, “By definition all scientists are data scientists. In my opinion, they are half hacker, half analyst, they use data to build products and find insights. It’s Columbus meet Columbo – starry eyed explorers and skeptical detectives.”

These detective/ explorers will continue to be highly sought after as our big data explosion continues.  Big data analytics companies will also emerge attempting to  support (or replace) the role through their software platform.  After all, it’s not the size of the data, it’s what you do with it.

Come to our Under the Radar Conference to meet emerging big data analytics companies as well as LivePerson’s own Data Scientist, Vitaly Gordon.

Congratulations to Under the Radar presenter Compass Labs on raising $6 million funding from NEA, and Presidio Ventures. This brings the startup’s total funding to $12 million.

See their 2010 Under the Radar Pitch HERE.

Company Description: Compass Labs is the next generation Ads network, which enables advertisers to reach and effectively engage social media users. Our mission is to bring relevant and timely advertisements to users based on their expressed interests and intent. Compass Labs‘ real-time precision targeting enables brands and marketers to effectively harness the power of social media to precisely target potential buyers at the exact moment they are contemplating a purchase.

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When it comes to cloud computing, ‘Private’ versus ‘Public’ is ongoing debate as companies scale.  Many companies benefit from having a hybrid model; utilizing both private and public clouds like AWS. This allows  their cloud infrastructure to flex with spikes and dips in customer usage. For example, e-commerce sites need extra bandwidth around the holiday season. However, once some companies reach a certain size, moving more data to the private cloud may optimize performance.  Zynga is making the move to private-in fact 80% of its game traffic is now on their own private, “zCloud” as reported in their recent earnings call. (This is opposite of last year when 80% of operations were in AWS.)

Why Zynga is Moving to Private:

1.  Efficiency: zCloud is about 3 times more efficient  than AWS.  At the Cloud Connect Conference, Zynga said that it could eliminate one in three servers since moving its operations from AWS to its own private cloud.  It can also have 1,000 servers up and running in 24 hours.

2.  Tailored: According to a Venture Beat article, Zynga tailored zCloud design and eliminated every bottleneck in server components such as microprocessors, storage, and memory.

3. Intelligence: Because they own the infrastructure, Zynga has inside information on how they servers work and the computing experience that players have-allowing them to measure and adapt accordingly.  According to Tech Crunch, Zynga has created custom monitoring and management tools.

The cost question is still out there…but a private cloud can provide enormous savings if performance increases and usage consistently grows.  Zynga still has a relationship with AWS for flexibility although that may change as zCloud expands.  In fact, some have asked if zCloud could ever become a mini AWS in itself.

Congratulations to Under the Radar alumni Fanminder on raising $1 million in funding from Silicon Valley executives including Square COO Keith Rabois and PayPal VP of Marketing Peter Karpas.

Fanminder is also rolling out version 2.0 of its customer loyalty platform. Fanminder offers small businesses a web-based dashboard enabling the creation of coupons and discounts distributed via mobile, email and social networking sites and redeemed in-store on customers’ phones. Fanminder 2.0 introduces a series of new features including mobile-optimized webpages for each promotion, an offers gallery, themes and expert-created marketing campaigns. More than 6,000 small businesses are now using Fanminder services, with another 1,000 SMBs signing on every month. Fanminder is currently in the process of raising Series A funding.

See their 2010 Under the Radar Presentation HERE.

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Love is in the air, and it isn’t just for Valentine’s Day couples.  Corporations have been canoodling one another in attempts to form a union. The recent turmoil in the capital markets and the heavy accumulation of corporate cash have created grand opportunities. According to The Street, we could be in a merger and acquisition boom. Not only are banks willing to start lending more, but acquirers will pay premiums for companies they truly adore-ones that can help them expand their distribution channels.  However, other thought leaders think differently.  Ernst and Young feels that the technology markets won’t be able to keep up the pace of 2011 M&A activity.  What is the future for tech in 2012? Is their cash left to burn? How will the top recent acquisitions settle once the honeymoon phase is over? And are ones their size repeatable?

Is M&A Love Repeatable? 3 Big 2011 Acquisitions Just Settling:

$12.5B: Just this week the US department of Justice approved Google’s acquisition of Motorola. Google’s interest in Motorola was largely around its patents, all of which help protect the Android in legal battles.

$11B: HP acquisition of Autonomy (UK). This deal was the largest in the European tech sector giving HP new customer accounts as well as new ways to “manage and extract data.”

$3.4B: SAP bought cloud computing software Success Factors, mainly to keep up with Oracle. In this case, buying was far faster than building.

These price tags may not buy love, but they certainly increase its bargaining power. Curious about “selling out” yourself? To learn about the future of start-up M&A activity come to our Strategy Session in Los Angeles March 6^th.  We’ll discuss acquisition strategies from both sides of the deal.

The open source software Hadoop is creating a lot of buzz in the big data world.  It’s commonly known as the MapReduce algorithm on which Google built its empire.  Forrester Research calls it, “The Open Source Heart Of Big Data.”

However, as the buzz builds the term is thrown around recklessly, leaving many confused as to how it works and where it is used.  Derrick Harris of GigaOm authored an article explaining Hadoop terminology and top uses.

Derrick writes, “Hadoop is an Apache Software Foundation project consisting of two primary subprojects — Hadoop MapReduce and the Hadoop Distributed File System. MapReduce is the parallel-processing engine that allows Hadoop to churn through large data sets in relatively short order. HDFS is the distributed file system that lets Hadoop scale across commodity servers and, importantly, store data on the compute nodes in order to boost performance (and potentially save money). “

Three Ways Hadoop is Used

Distribution: Distribution refers to the way in which large data sets are moved between Hadoop clusters and other environments. Companies like Cloudera and the new HortonWorks play in this space.

Management Software: These Hadoop products act as an operating system and help you trouble shoot.  There aren’t many unique vendors in this space. Derrick writes, “Such products are usually sold or offered by companies peddling Hadoop distributions because even when commercially packaged, Hadoop is still a complex architecture…”

Application software: Application software resides on top of Hadoop distribution and improves processing and/or performs analytics.   Derrick mentions Karmasphere Analyst, Hadapt,  and HStreaming. Jeff Kelley from Services Angle also calls out a few others “Hadoop applications of the future” such as Datameer, Tresata and Tidemark.

To learn more about how Hadoop is used, read Derrick’s full article in GigaOm.  To discover more emerging Hadoop companies transforming the world of big data, come to our Under the Radar Conference on April 25-26 in Mountain View, CA.

Announcing our third annual GROW Conference: Rethinking Business! We are putting together top entrepreneurial speakers to answer your burning questions on launching, scaling and staying relevant.  Now is your chance to place your request and we’ll pass it on!

If you had access to your favorite entrepreneur-what would you ask them?  What are you dying to know? We want to hear from you!

Please leave a comment or tweet us @growconf.  Join our discussion and take an active role in GROW2012!

GROW2012: RE-THINKING BUSINESS

Engage or die. The social web has changed expectations and empowered consumers with real-time information and a digital soapbox. These consumers are your customers and your employees. In today’s noisy marketplace with low switching costs, they can leave you at any time. To stay competitive, companies must create a culture of respect and openness, build a strong brand identity, and emotionally engage their community. In the land of ‘me too’ companies what you stand for and how you interact is your differentiator.

In a unique three day event learn from leaders as they discuss lessons learned throughout each phase of the business life cycle. Join the conversation with 700 influential founders, corporate executives, and leading investors from across the globe

GROW 2012: AUGUST 22-24
Join our third annual GROW conference in Vancouver, BC to hear industry leaders speak on growth, adaption, and staying relevant.

50 TICKETS RELEASED AT 50% OFF!
Early Bird tickets are so much better than getting a worm.
REGISTER HERE
(Super Early Bird tickets are $295; 50% off door price)

Big data.  It’s all Silicon Valley is talking about.  And it’s all our Under the Radar judges seem to care about.  Of course the term ‘big data’ has become about as nebulous as the word ‘cloud.’  A few months ago we authored a post called , What the f*ck is Big Data? highlighting all the ways it’s used from monitoring to processing to storage to analysis.  In talking to CIOs and VPs of Technology at Visa, Citigroup, Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Levi’s and WebMD, two things popped to the top of the list as major priorities:

#1 Processing big data (in terms of database scalability). Startups like MemSQL, ScaleArc, NimbusDB all play in this space to improve performance.

#2 Analyzing big data. Companies like Datasift, Chart.io, and Metamarkets are all working toward gathering and analyzing internal and external data sets.

Do you have a technology solution that tackles big data?  Our judges are interested in you!  Apply to present at our Under the Radar conference!

What makes you different from other entrepreneurs trying to build start-ups? You are competing with thousands of entrepreneurs for the same resources, talent, and capital, are you really sure you’re cut out for this? What can you do as a founder to attract the best people and funding? What are you doing to build the network you need to be successful? What are you willing to sacrifice to get the company built? When was the last time you went down to Silicon Valley/Alley? Join us to talk about the difference between Entrepreneurs or Wantrepreneurs.

Meet Some of the Panelists:

Daniel Debow, CEO, Rypple
David Crow, founder, StartupNorth.ca
Michael Litt, CEO, Vidyard
Debbie Landa, Founder, Dealmaker Media (Grow Conference & Co-Founder, GrowLab)
Jason Bailey, Co-Founder, GrowLab

GROW2012 Tour Dates:

February 13  - Toronto, Canada   - Register

February 14  - Waterloo, Canada - Register

February 15 – Montreal, Canada - Register

Dear awesome entrepreneur,

PIE (Portland Incubator Experiment) — a Portland based startup accelerator that gives you cash, office space, and three months of intensive mentorship — has opened applications for its next class and they’d love to have you apply to be part of it.

The PIE application form features many of the standard incubator/accelerator questions about the awesome product you’re building and the dream team you’ve assembled to bring it to fruition. It even asks a few questions about why you think you’re the perfect fit within PIE, itself.

If you’re currently sitting there, working on your dream, you owe it to yourself to throw your hat into the ring for the next class of PIE. It could be that push you need to make your startup fantasy into a reality.

Deadline is February 24, 2012. So don’t delay! We’re looking forward to seeing your application.

Contact:

http://piepdx.com

@piepdx

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Facebook’s $5 billion IPO filing will make it the largest web company IPO in history.  The engineers that stuck it out for the long haul are doing victory dances.  However what does that mean for the rest of us?  What other ripple effects will the IPO have on our economy?

1. Real estate prices: According to a talk on NPR this morning, real estate agents are getting ready to see a spike in Silicon Valley new home purchases from the newly rich Facebook employees. This may create a buying frenzy in the whole area, carrying over to other bay area residential and business areas.

2. Mobile advertising: According to the S-1 filing, Facebook plans to massively expand its mobile reach.  In the past four months, mobile users have increased 21%. Currently Facebook mobile is ad free, although a high percentage of Facebook’s revenue has come from its site advertising.  As we use our mobile device more and more, we can only expect advertisers to follow us.

3. Social Gaming: With the IPO filing, Facebook has to spend about $10B of the money they raise.  Given that third party games still generate a lot of revenue for Facebook, many wonder if they won’t try to invest in the space themselves and act as a first party publisher.  Internal development would allow Facebook to be leader in the space and create a fuller mobile offering.

4. Privacy: Everyone wants to know how Facebook will handle privacy post IPO. An IPO means Wall Street expectations to monetize, monetize, monetize.  Unfortunately for consumers this could be our personal data.  It will be interesting to see how the company will still build a community that caters to us while making money off of us.

We may see massive Facebook changes now that it’s married to Wall Street.  However, remember that Mark Zuckerberg still own nearly 28 % of the company. Hopefully with his leadership, we’ll still be old school messaging and sharing. Who knows, maybe we’ll start throwing sheep at each other again.

The word ”scale” to startups typically means rapid growth after launching their product.  “Scale” progress is measured by subscribers per month or transactions per second. However, Yobie Benjamin, Global Chief Technology Officer of Citigroup ICG/GTS says “scale” has a much wider definition when applied to larger enterprises like financial service companies.

What can we learn from industry leaders in massive scaling? What technologies do you need to provide in order to partner with the global leaders like Citigroup?  Read our interview with Yobie to blow your mind on a whole new type of scaling.

Q: What is scale in your world?

A: In most large financial institutions, number of users, concurrency, and response time are just the beginning — table stakes.  Now add on:

1. Response to compliance matters in near real-time

2. Pronounced security for the entity, its regulators and customers

3. Reality that the world is not America and that each and every country no matter how small can affect global operations.

Think of a single multi-national client that operates in over a hundred countries that includes unstable governments. Now pretend that the financial company takes in and makes payments in massive retail volume. Now multiply that multi-national client by thousands and then by an extension of their customers in the hundreds of millions of individuals.

Q: What key things do companies need to address to scale globally?

A: Regulatory issues are at the top of the list but can be broken down into other matters that are no less important.   For example, in the EU privacy is a serious matter and is very different from the American point-of-view.

Another example are the discreet laws of individual countries — The crime of insulting a monarch, a throwback to a bygone era of absolute
sovereign power is still very much in force in Thailand. In a leading large important Asian country, promoting or “seen as facilitating” an “outlaw group” can lead to charter revocation.

Q: You mentioned latency challenges when companies try to scale in countries that have intense regulatory issues and government filtering.  How does a company best plan to expand in those types of countries?

A: Almost all countries monitor most communications that cross through their digital borders.  Some look at everything, every word, bit and
byte.  Some look for key words.  Financial transactions are generally tracked, particularly those that cross a threshold that triggers AML
(anti-money laundering), monitoring of terrorist financing, etc. Some filtering technologies used by countries are better than others
and inevitably affect response time performance. There is no way around it in some countries. In others, one can use adjacent networks
but it’s not easy and it can be construed as a violation of regulations.

Q: Many startups in the infrastructure and cloud services space are targeting financial institutions as partners and customers.  What do they need to address to meet your particular scaling needs?

A: Automated KYC (know your customer) and AML solutions would be an area of extreme interest.  It has to be in real time.