We caught up with Samir Saluja, who we’ve covered before when he started DeriveOne about his new venture, Ahrian LLC.

Marketing Darwinism:  Tell us about Ahrian, your new firm.

Samir:  Thanks Paul.  Ahrian is a boutique consulting firm that will take on a limited number of deep customer partnerships this year.  We work on audience development, innovation and innovation processes, channel empowerment, and market development.  Underpinning these concepts is data, research, and technology.  I’m as excited about Ahrian as I have been about anything else professionally.

Marketing Darwinism: Ahrian – great name.  Tell us more.

Samir:  Well, I must admit, Ahrian is the name of my son.  Just as he’s the light of my full life, this company is the light of my work life.

Marketing Darwinism: You were at Microsoft for a long time.  How does your experience there inflect your work at Ahrian?

Samir:  At Microsoft, I was surrounded by really driven, smart people who thought about speed and scale.  When I co-founded DeriveOne, we wanted to combine speed and scale with actionable insights for companies that were seeking outside help to validate hypotheses and understand their customers, and then with our Project Simile joint venture we have been applying recent advances in machine learning to help customers measure metaphor resonance for brand and communication strategies. With Ahrian, I am synthesizing all my past experience- even my experience in International Trade, to bring to bear the entire panoply of services to my customers.

Marketing Darwinism: You openly say that you aren’t seeking any and all customers, just the right ones.  In fact you call these customer partnerships.  Please walk us through that logic.

Samir:  Deep relationships are partnerships and the only way to truly serve customers is my discovering, exploring, and building together.  I do not want to add only a thin-layer of value but to be considered a real team member, just with a different email address.  Without that depth, you miss context and nuance and without complexity and attending to nuance, you cannot create lasting products and solutions.  Ahrian is my ode to that concept.

Marketing Darwinism: Are you focusing on particular verticals?

Samir:  Yes and no.  We do a lot of work with technology companies and with their ecosystem.  We also work with Fintech and other adjacent areas.  We do so from the vantage point of data-driven growth combined with wisdom and experience.  Ahrian is a prescriptive company but never is it implied that we know better, only that we have an alternative point of view that should be considered.  That has resonated very well in these sectors and will hopefully elsewhere as well.

Marketing Darwinism: What are you most excited about?

Samir:  Building a true boutique firm.  A McKinsey of sorts without the baggage and overhead.

Second, I want to be friends with all my customer partners.  It’s not worth doing if you can’t enjoy your time with people.  If the pandemic has taught us anything it is that life is short, and all solutions start with investing time in people that inspire and fulfill you personally and professionally.

Marketing Darwinism: Steven, it’s been a while since we caught up but I know you are doing something very interesting and relevant now. Can you tell us about your new project?

Steven: Thanks. The last 15 years have been very interesting for me and have culminated in the new stealth startup I’m building. As you know, I cofounded Ascentium and we grew it from zero to 90M in a little less than 7 years. Our entire focus was technology in context and a relentless focus on customer needs. We build the entire company around the customer in our “surround” strategy. When we sold it, I moved into an area that always fascinated me- hospitality, where I partnered with some of the most incredible technical talent to build and nurture systems for hotels, casinos, and other hospitality ventures. My new startup is connected to that space.

Marketing Darwinism: Isn’t the timing for that, well, awkward given the 80% decline in hotel stays and the pandemic situation in general.

Steven: On the surface, yes. But when you dig deeper, you see that when the industry recovers- even if not 100% or even close- it will need flexible systems that can elastically throttle up and down. In addition, as assets get repurposed and value is derived from new modes of business, the currently rigid systems will have to flex. That’s the key to a post- Covid 19 scenario.

Marketing Darwinism: Fascinating. When you talk about repurposing, in some ways that is the key. Transformation, Pivoting, Repurposing….these are buzzwords. Is there something more to them?

Steven: It’s a great point. For many, the “pivots” they’ve announced are hardly interesting. I mean going from serving a sandwich in a closed environment to offering it for pick-up is necessary but not super-innovative. But imagine converting a hotel into a hospital or into temporary work space? Imagine a physical business that transforms itself into a digital, ether-based business. These are the sorts of things that deeply vertical solutions will have to accommodate going forward.

Marketing Darwinism: So, given that, what is your focus now?

Steven: We start with the customer. Customers have been telling me for a long time that they need modular solutions that allow them to scale up and down and don’t require a complex and impacted process or culture curve to adopt. My goal as a technology builder is to start with these needs, to deeply contextualize myself in the culture, and only then to architect the technology. So, as we launch, we will be sure to continue to give you, Paul, the exclusive insight into our plans!

Marketing Darwinism: Steven, how does Marketing fit into your new startup’s plans?

Steven: I’ve always been a big believer in Marketing. All effective companies must communicate clearly and often, and I believe Marketing is the key here. Products are great to build but they can “sit on the shelf” without an effective strategy to win influential people to avail of their benefits. While I am a technologist in the first instance, I am a Marketer in the second; I’ve never built a company without a superb Marketer in the first 3 hires.

Marketing Darwinism: Any thoughts about the future of hospitality and hotels?

Steven: I believe that the industry will find its footing. While we cannot say that this pandemic came out of nowhere, it certainly caught many industries flat-footed. But in the past 2 months I’ve seen story after story of positive transformation – as I alluded to before- and have seen that the entire ecosystem that supports the industry is ready to retool. As such, I think that our job as technologists is to enable and accelerate the processes by which this reinvention takes place. I don’t necessarily believe we’ll be back to the “glory days,” but I’m clear that the new scenario will not be as bleak as was thought in the first waves of this pandemic. Success will be had again!

Marketing Darwinism:  Pulak, tell us about Pepper.

Pulak:  Thanks Paul.  Pepper was conceived as an end-to-end platform for Asset Managers who seek simplicity in a deeply complex world.  Asset Management is indeed complex; think of the questions Asset Managers have to answer:  What investments should I make?  How should I optimally manage the investments I have made/my portfolio?  What are the regulatory and data frameworks that govern the different asset classes in the portfolio?  How should I get real-time intelligence on my investments?  How should I report to my investors?  How do I differentiate from other Asset Managers?  These questions lend themselves to a platform- approach to this space.  So we built Pepper.

Marketing Darwinism:  Tell us more about Pepper’s origins.

Pulak:  I’ve spent my whole career in and around this space.  What appears to be a perfectly working machine from the outside has the usual issues when viewed from the inside.  We are talking about the management of trillions of dollars across a plethora of asset classes and a complex and dynamic international system of rules, regulations, compliance, and risk tolerance.  When I realized there are ways to simplify this, to help Asset Managers focus on client-return and not the perspiration and minutiae they have to spend much of their time on, Pepper was born.

Marketing Darwinism:  So is Pepper just an idea like so many startups or are you in market?

Pulak:  Great question.  There are so many claims made in the “Fintech” space that are theoretical and not tried and tested.  So I appreciate the question.  We are very much in market.  We are a revenue generating company with a blue-chip client base.  But I will say that my background is deep product design so I over-indexed on building a resilient comprehensive platform.  So we are now launching a massive marketing push to expand our customer footprint.

Marketing Darwinism:  Marketing is “music to my ears.”  Tell us more about your plans.

Pulak:  We are in a sector that requires very strategic marketing and not scatter-shooting.  First of all, given the impact of this sector- with the trillions of dollars at play- we should not exaggerate or embellish.  We plan to use a very clear, authentic messaging strategy in the voice of a peer.  After all, the idea is to be clear that we built this on the backs of our own experience and from within the cauldron not from the outside.  We will certainly leverage the tools of modern marketing- LinkedIn and others to get our message out but ultimately we know the true potential of Pepper will be realized when organizations trial it and see its power.

Marketing Darwinism:  Pulak, you have mentioned “Fintech” a few times.  What do you think the future of the space is?

Pulak:  I think the future of Fintech is very healthy but as entrepreneurs we have to help make it healthy by building truly useful products and truly helping customers adopt them in their own contexts.  No technologies are silver-bullets without context and culture surrounding them.  We have to think about those aspects of our industry and then devise and hone products that are in keeping with those principles.  I’m very bullish but also very clear that we have to work hard for that bullishness to be warranted.

The following is a guest post from Samir Saluja, Founder DeriveOne and Romi Mahajan, CMRO Quantarium. Enjoy …

The metaphors we use to understand and process events, data, and thoughts are the ones that ultimately govern the ways in which we react to the stream of information that comes our way.  As we attempt to navigate the shoals of human behavior- in order to create a model for how indeed these metaphors connect with actions- it is clear that sentiments as a whole direct economic behavior, whether classified as consumer or business-to-business.   These sentiments are governed by a host of variables.

With the Covid-19 Pandemic raging across the world, we see sentiments gyrate wildly.  The stress of virus-induced death and sickness, the constant admonitions, our fear for loved ones and friends, and the disruption of life-as-we-know-it is real and palpable.  The lack of fixity, the presence of a persistent “unknown” exacerbates this stress and affects sentiments about all manner of subjects. 

In the first quarter of 2020, as the payload of the virus was delivered and public health experts suggested ways in which to slow its spread, many parts of the world witnessed a sudden economic downturn.  People stayed at home suddenly, weren’t able to either work or spend; demand for certain goods and services plummeted.  Employers laid millions of workers off.  A variety of businesses closed-shop many of which will likely stay shut.   Well, these processes cannot be referred to only in the past tense.  These trends continue unabated- dismal economic figures are released daily by many of the world’s major economies. 

Precarity is the order of the day.  Mental health providers are witnessing a spectacular rise and cannot handle the scale of calls upon their services.  Depression has become commonplace. 

In this environment, the metaphors that govern the sentiments and thus the outlook of most Americans are direct results of the pandemic and its consequences -and understandably so.

How will this affect economic decision-making?  To speculate thus, it is important to understand the metaphors people use to process information and thus inform decisions.  Some early thoughts here based on recent reviews of news, polls, and in-person conversations:

Clearly, more nuance is required.  For instance, a recent study by Simile shows that “Boomers” and “Millennials” have markedly different views of and sentiments triggered by the Covid-19 Pandemic.  As such, their responses, even economic responses, will be inflected by these sentiments; likely, millennials will want to “transact” in “normal” ways with more haste than older Americans. 

The biggest asset class and backbone of the US Economy- Housing- will undergo a sea-change not only in scope but also in process.  March 2020 witnessed a 22% decline in housing starts and the largest dip in homebuilder sentiment in the history of its measurement.  Multiple anecdotes from Real Estate agents refer to a blight in listings and a “dead” market.  Being able to understand sentiment and translate the understanding into predictions is an incredibly important part of the planning process, as we seek economic retooling and recovery.  Here, the sentiments of fear and uncertainty play a large role as do some of the elements of the purchase/sale process.   For example, no one wants an appraiser traipsing through his house and no one wants to stage her house and open it for viewing, not to mention that very few people would risk touring houses in an era of fear and social-distancing.  These trends bode ill for business-as-usual in the housing economy.

The sentiments provoked by the pandemic will change existing economic patterns and create new ones.  Understanding the metaphors and sentiments evoked by this crisis and then innovating around the processes by which they can be translated into economic activity is key.  Without a doubt, the human tragedy unfolding is the biggest story related to the Pandemic; when and if we contain the virus and reduce it to a minor irritation, fixing the economy is next-up.  

Marketing Darwinism spoke to an old friend and associate, Vivek Bhaskaran, Founder and CEO of QuestionPro.

Marketing Darwinism: Vivek, some big changes in QuestionPro I see. Can you tell us more?

Vivek: Paul, thanks. Yes, we’ve moved the company to Austin, Texas and are ready for our next large phase of investment and growth. We hit 200 people and I realized that we were no longer the scrappy startup full of hungry, footloose folks. We are now an established brand with world-class talent and as such wanted to find a city that would sustain us as we double revenue and increase the team substantially. Austin has proved to be a perfect location for QP.

Marketing Darwinism: Other than the move, what else is new and exciting at QP?

Vivek: Well, we’ve been asked by customers, partners, and users to help them use research, information gathering, and other elements to provide amazing experiences to their customers and ecosystem; as we thought about their feedback, we realized that while twenty years ago, we were a “survey” company, we are now truly a company that facilitates what we call “e(t)” or “experience transformation.” The markets are simply too crowded for any organization to NOT help its customers provide experiences to their customers. We are very happy with this concept, which we see not so much as a pivot but as a continuation of our QP proposition.

Marketing Darwinism: Vivek, QuestionPro has a set of “sister” companies that you’ve helped create. Tell us about them.

Vivek: Well, even though we try to be humble, I must say that when I look at the family of companies that I’ve helped build, lead, and grow, I think first of my incredible partners in crime- the team. QuestionPro has people all across the globe- who think about the mothership as well as Ideascale and TryMyUI, both lead by incredible friends and leaders. There are so many synergies in the QP family of companies and each has grown magnificently. We know it’s a combination of hard-work and luck so every day we thank our customers and amazing associates for their contributions to this.

Marketing Darwinism: What are some of the factors that aren’t captured in the numbers? Is there some sort of secret sauce?

Vivek: Well, I could say it’s our culture but so many organizations have great cultures. Frankly, I think it’s our business model which has always been predicated on ease of adoption, intense listening, and frictionless service. When your mantra is that you have to shave all friction out of the company in order to do what’s right- at the right price- for tens of thousands of customers then you’ll be successful irrespective of other factors. Well, you do need a great product too!

Marketing Darwinism: How does Marketing fit into your growth planning?

Vivek: Throughout our history, we’ve oscillated on this question but now, we take marketing and the marketing community incredibly seriously. In fact, my mentor is a marketer who lives in the Seattle area and he has always beat me up on this matter. We’ve realized that great marketers think about audiences and experiences and worry a bit less about the numbers and ROI. They come from audience and experience. So, yes, we are investing heavily in marketing and it has paid dividends.

Marketing Darwinism: Any parting thoughts?

Vivek: Well, I want to leave your readers with just a few thoughts. First, please check out QuestionPro and send me feedback if we don’t wow you. Second, for my fellow founders out there, build the company you want to build not the company that others put pressure on you to build. Finally, simplify always. Nothing else works.

Marketing Darwinism met up with Dharmesh Godha of Advaiya to see how the company is progressing and what their next “big bet” is on.

Marketing Darwinism:   Dharmesh, good to chat again.  I know you’ve done a lot with the company over the past several years; give us a refresher on who Advaiya is and what the company stands for.

Dharmesh:  Thanks Paul.  To start with, it’s worth mentioning our tagline here- “Making Technology Work.” While that might sound cliché, we find that the abundance of technology choices and methodologies of implementation actually can conspire to make it difficult for companies to make the optimal bets.  Further, technology by itself doesn’t solve problems, so we work hard to make customers’ technology choices work in their context and in a manner that most befits them. 

We started the company for this reason.  No doubt, along the way, we took some turns, hit a few dead-ends but also found a few amazing areas to focus on.  All companies evolve.  Interestingly, we have come full-circle to a real competency- helping companies digitize in their own contexts and without the orthodoxies often imposed by technology-forward perspectives that don’t recognize that there are multiple paths to success.

So that’s a long way to say that we stand for driving our customers’ growth and success in their own image not in some “perfect state.” We have found that that state doesn’t exist!

Marketing Darwinism: This sounds like “Digital Transformation”.  Is that what you focus on?

Dharmesh: Yes and no.  DT is an amazing phrase but it has come to mean too many things at once.  We look at things in a forward-yet-practical way- start with a particular need a company has- a baby step- and get it right- technically, culturally, and contextually.  Then help the company use success in that one area or workload to change other area, processes, and workloads.  So yes it is transforming companies with digital technologies but it’s not about a “DT” button you can press and voila! -things work. 

Marketing Darwinism: You work with some amazingly successful, big names.  Does that create pressure on the company?

Dharmesh: We work with the largest of the large tech companies and with startups.  We are drawn to challenges and patterns where we can honestly add value.  We also work with a variety of organizations in what are called “traditional” industries.  That’s where most of the work done is and where most people in the country are employed.  We learn amazing things from manufacturing and services companies daily and can then apply these learnings to other companies looking to evolve and hone their offerings.  Yes, the “ways” of large companies can create pressure but we thrive in the cauldron and love every minute of it.

Marketing Darwinism: What are your big bets for 2019 and 2020? What are you most excited about?

Dharmesh: We are incredibly excited about helping companies find new life with the proper use of the amazing Business Applications and Analytics packages  available in the market today.   It was unheard of, even a few years ago, to be able to run complex infrastructure with complex tasks in an agile manner without pitting IT and Business against each other.  We thrive on building internal bridges in our customers and watching them do amazing things.  So, I can say that our big bet for the next 18 month is Business Apps.and Analytics  We also have invested heavily in our “Managed Services” business which is growing rapidly and allowing us to really feel “as one” with many of our customers.

Marketing Darwinism:   We’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about Marketing.  Two prongs here- what are you doing to help your customers market and how are you using marketing to gain traction?

Dharmesh: Great questions.  We continue to do a lot of work in what we call TMAAS- Technical Marketing-As-A-Service.  We believe that Enterprise technology has to be talked about in a narrative manner that connects value to all aspects of purchase, implementation and tweaking.  We also believe that Brand building and Sales Enablement are connected and we offer that perspective to our customers.

In terms of our own efforts, we gain a lot from events, 1: few executive conclaves, and work of mouth marketing.  Though we are small, we spend considerably in those areas and have been lucky to realize success there.  Increasingly, we co-market with our customers and this also has yielded fruit.

Marketing Darwinism:   Any parting thoughts?

Dharmesh: Thanks so much Paul. We want believe that global delivery models aligned to real value conversations are the keys to success.  We hope to double our size in the next 18 months and are very thankful to our customers, partners, and well-wishers for all their support.

Submitted article by Romi Mahajan

Chief Commercial Officer, Quantarium

The world of technology is known as much for its hype as it is for its legitimate innovations.  Atone level, this is understandable. Dreamers can only accomplish big things when they dream big and followup on those dreams with supporting rhetoric. At a different level, however, it serves to dupe consumers, customers,and investors into alchemist fantasies that often defy the laws of physics.  What we need, naturally, is a balance.

With AI, and claims about it, we as a community have come to the point where we have to decide if we are okay with “fact-checking.”  Are all claims about AI fair and accurate?  Do all companies that claim to be “doing AI” pass muster in that regard? After all, haven’t many organizations referred to any and all of their “data”initiatives as AI? Have we diluted the term so as to make it meaningless?

Discerning investors have started to kick the AI tires.  Highly skilled Scientists and Engineers increasingly refuse to be beguiled by marketing claims, choosing instead to dig deeply into the code and methodologies surrounding its production before allowing themselves to be recruited by the countless organizations that seek the limited supply of talent. 

Perhaps more relevant, still, is that people in all roles ask one fundamental question:  “Is there any relevant and practical application to the AI work you are doing?”

On all these matters, Quantarium can hold its head high.  From “Real AI” to “Real Applications of AI,”Quantarium is altering and enhancing our notions of what is possible in residential real estate, the world’s single largest asset class.

Take for instance an important but mundane question, likely asked by millions of people every day.  “What is my house worth?”  Several pundits will offer several answers to this question, no doubt.  But, will the answers be accurate and in this case, what does accuracy even mean?  What data goes into the answer?  Do we have all the data we need?  Is it all available? Do the data we collect account for every single aspect of the house that could or should go into the valuation? 

Now take an extrapolation of this question with magnified scale.  Imagine you are the CEO of a large bank that “owns” half-a-million residential mortgages. What is your portfolio worth?  How much risk are you holding in the portfolio?  Are you too exposed in a particular geography or demographic?  Do you have sufficient data and the ability to process and make sense out of it?  Can you do this all with the speed that is called for by regulation and market conditions?

These questions are easy to pose but hard to answer.  Further, while these questions may not seem “sexy,” they underscore the reality of the single biggest source of economic value and for most families the single largest source of equity.  Using AI to drive accuracy, speed, and scale in this market is complex, genuine and incredibly important.Indeed, real AI applied to real industries with real outcomes is the name of the game. Therein lies the balance we seek, the convergence of both the hype and of the reality.

Marketing Darwinism caught up with Christopher Woodrow, CEO of MovieCoin, an innovative company that tokenizes movie projects and other real assets. By writing these assets to the blockchain and using smart contracts to automate transaction, the company is digitizing the entertainment industry’s inefficient, paper-based supply chain. With its goal to bring significant volumes of new investment capital into the film business by transforming traditional financing processes, MovieCoin is creating “Hollywood 2.0.”

Marketing Darwinism: Christopher, tell us about MovieCoin.  What you have going on seems revolutionary.

Christopher:  Thank you, Paul. We started MovieCoin in 2017 after realizing that blockchain and security tokens had the potential to bring unprecedented levels of transparency and liquidity into the film economy.

Shortly thereafter we started seeking a qualified technical partner who could help bring life to our vision of creating access, unleashing creativity, improving liquidity, and boosting cross-industry collaboration in the entertainment industry. That’s when we met Igor Khmel, founder and CEO at technology development firm BANKEX,  and realized there was tremendous synergy between the two sides. The technology we’re developing sets us up for huge success in 2019 and beyond.

Marketing Darwinism: If we understand properly, there are several components to your business.  Can you shed some light here?

Christopher: Absolutely. The MovieCoin platform includes a website, wallet, distributed application and mobile application, which enable accredited investors to participate in financing quality feature films initially sourced by MovieCoin’s seasoned media executives and held within the company’s Smart Fund. Investing in this portfolio requires purchasing MovieCoin Smart Fund (“MSF”) security tokens that represent an ownership stake in the Fund. They offer a more liquid means of entry into film financing than traditional methods lacking a secondary market.

A separate cryptocurrency, Moviecoin Tokens, will denominate value for B2B and B2C transactions throughout MovieCoin’s ecosystem. Moviecoin Tokens (“MOV”) are publicly available as a cash substitute that brings more speed and transparency to revenue distribution and tracking. This holistic view of product performance, including revenue shares; licensing ownership; and intellectual property rights, prevents third-parties from holding onto capital owed to investors and talent for longer than necessary.

Over time, the company will also introduce MovieCoin ‘as-a-Service’, inviting major film studios to market their own film and television financing opportunities to a broader audience using MSF tokens. MOV tokens also provide consumer behavior data to help businesses refine their marketing efforts.

Marketing Darwinism: This makes perfect sense. Tell us about the team you’ve assembled to tackle this. 

Christopher: Well I’m a financer and film producer who has led the production of box office successes including “Black Mass,” “Hacksaw Ridge,” and Academy Award Best Picture, “Birdman.” The company’s broader executive team brings a wealth of experience from investment banking; portfolio management; corporate law; film financing, production and distribution; technology deployment and public company management. Combined with outstanding technologists and marketers, we have a well-rounded team that fundamentally believes in this opportunity to create Hollywood 2.0.

Marketing Darwinism: You refer to your Bankex partnership often.  Can you explain a bit more?

Christopher: BANKEX is a critical partner in our mission to launch MovieCoin. Igor Khmel, founder and CEO, is a visionary in the world of financial technology who’s created a preeminent bank-as-a-service blockchain-based company. By combining their technical expertise with our inherent knowledge of film financing, production and distribution, this cooperation will be the foundation for MovieCoin’s success.

Marketing Darwinism: Any parting thoughts?

Christopher: There are several components to our company that, while complex, will act in unison to democratize access, share knowledge, and improve the film and entertainment industry as we know it. I ask anyone who is keen to learn more about MovieCoin to reach out to us via our social channels with all your questions, sign up for our newsletter to receive regular updates, or check out the company’s whitepaper.

Marketing Darwinism: I’m very interested in CloudFit’s strategy. Can you tell our readers a bit more about it?

JM: Thanks Paul for your affirmation. CloudFit is in the “Managed Digital Transformation” space. What this means specifically is that Digital Transformation is very much a function of embracing the cloud and that migrating your applications and workloads to the cloud is not a “one and done” exercise. Cloud Migration as a concept has to be understand as both a set of generalizable principles but also as a very individual factor as each business has its own priorities and constraints. Our software and services accelerate this journey and allow customers to “migrate, monitor, and measure” their cloud applications.

Marketing Darwinism: Fascinating. So is this mostly about financial savings (since you mentioned acceleration?)

KW: It’s about operational excellence of which a piece is financial savings, a piece is accountability, and a piece is working in the background so that the organization can grow its core business and innovate versus getting all its energies caught up in the transformation itself. As a CFO I think about my peers and their needs but I also think about the roles of the CIO and CEO as they are charged with technology-enabled futures.

Marketing Darwinism: You two boast 4 decades of collective Microsoft experience and your three other Principals add another 4 decades. Wow! Tell me about that.

JM and KW: Microsoft has played a huge role in our collective learning and imagination. We are humbled to have been part of Microsoft’s journey to the forefront of Enterprise Computing, Cloud Services, and related areas. We are proud of the large scale we helped enable. Microsoft and its amazing people continue to be core partners and vectors for our success. Clearly, the customers are our main focus and at times they run hybrid or non-Microsoft environments. As a software and services company we have to both respect the customers’ needs but also remember where we came from!

Marketing Darwinism: You are a young company but have already done a major acquisition. That’s very ambitious. Am I reading this correctly?

JM: Paul thanks for this question. Yes, our acquisition of Composable Systems cemented both our team but also our ongoing and deep relationships with core customers. We are indeed young but are very hungry to add value and wanted to create a force multiplier early. We welcomed not only the revenue and customer streams but also the team and expertise.

KW: I’d like to add to this too. We all have had big company backgrounds as you know; I’ve also had the pleasure to help build one of the fastest growing technology companies in the Northwest and understand the importance of building the right team and equipping them with the right tools from the get-go. We didn’t start CloudFit to be a lifestyle business but instead of grow quickly as a function of our value-add.

Marketing Darwinism: What do your customers say about you?

JM: Paul, thanks for bringing it back to them. We get very favorable reviews from our customers, many of whom consider us as key partners in their Digital Transformation. In the earlier days, we had a few hiccups and we learned from these. We went in with confident humility and have improved our customer story, interaction, and value-delivery each and every day. We hope to continue to improve. But overall we feel very good about this area of our business.

Marketing Darwinism: What’s the “Garden-variety” case for someone to contact CloudFit?

KW and JM: We believe that any organization that knows they want to transform but needs to understand what the journey is and how to do it in a methodical and accountable way while accelerating time to value is a perfect conversation for us. We want to partner with all organizations that are entering this journey and need to connect their Business needs with this IT process. We believe that Managed Digital Transformation is a very large space and is where the puck is going.

Marketing Darwinism caught up with Samir Saluja, Co-Founder of DeriveOne and former Microsoft Learning Executive.

Marketing Darwinism: Samir, you left Microsoft to start DeriveOne with your partner Jason Talwar. Tell us about that transition.

Samir: Microsoft played a huge role in my development and in my understanding of the needs of customers. It also helped me understand the importance of data and using data for scale. What Jason and I realized is that despite the importance of data in the organizational and business world, most were not conceiving of it correctly or in the most efficient manner. We saw that “data for data’s sake” started becoming the essential mantra for companies and we wanted to help them avoid that trap. Thus we started DeriveOne. We consider Microsoft a key partner so still are in the ecosystem.

Marketing Darwinism: “Data for data’s sake?” What do you mean?

Samir: Data has come to be seen as an important commodity and as such companies are scrambling to ingest it and even hoard it. Ingestion is great but what about digestion? How do you use this data? What about data-overload? What about useless data? What about “fake” data? The point here is that data is not an unalloyed good if not trained on decisions. In fact, we believe you need to look at the decisions first and figure out the data needed based on the decisions not just because “data is good.”

Marketing Darwinism: You have a very varied background. Tell us more about your journey.

Samir: Thanks Paul. I have spent time in the Peace Corp, as an entrepreneur, as a business-owner, as a Microsoft employee and as a volunteer. All of these experiences helped me converge on being who I am today, personally and professionally. The Peace Corp helped me learn to listen, empathize and act. Being an entrepreneur taught me about risk and reward. Microsoft helped me understand the importance scaling through partnerships. DeriveOne has helped me realize the value of focus.

Marketing Darwinism: Why should an organization hire DeriveOne?

Samir: We believe that partnering with our customers in the context of what they need and what their customers need is crucial. We help organizations, medium to large and even some startups, use data to hone and focus their customer segmentation strategy, the cognitive diversity of their teams, and to inculcate the culture of decision-driven data. We believe that methodology matters, eliciting what the true decisions that need to be made is key, and delivering accountability is necessary. We are humbled daily by interest in our company.