Empact 100 Award at The White House

The Awards ceremony took place during National Entrepreneurship Month, which happens every year in Washington. I’d been to DC during this time a few years back to speak at GW and Howard, and even to Capitol Hill, but this was my first trip to The White House.

It was a great experience, and I was lucky to spend quality time with a number of awesome entrepreneurs and fellow award winners (shout outs to my old friends and new ones – Brent Beshore, Jeremy Johnson, Lauren Bias, Erik Groset, Ilya Pozin). I also got to meet some very interesting people in the administration like Valerie Jarret and Aneesh Chopra.

As part of the awards ceremony, 20 entrepreneurs were chosen to make a pledge of their time, money or other resources to help young entrepreneurs get their businesses off the ground. I was one of the lucky few who was asked to make a pledge on stage (and on camera – live on whitehouse.gov), and committed 1,000 hours over the next ten years to mentor and advise startups completely probono. If you’d like me to help you, please contact me, and I’ll try and schedule you in as fast possible.

In light of the recent economic turmoil, and recent signs of recovery, President Obama is pushing entrepreneurship as a powerful way of creating new jobs. A few years ago, the SBA published a report saying startups and small businesses create more than 50% of all jobs in America. However, given all the positive macroeconomic externalities, at a micro level, it’s still too hard for the average American to start a business.

Starting a company is harder yet, near impossible, if you’re foreign born, which doesn’t make any sense given that foreign entrepreneurs create so many jobs in America:

According to the studies, in a quarter of the U.S. science and technology companies founded from 1995 to 2005, the chief executive or lead technologist was foreign-born. In 2005, these companies generated $52 billion in revenue and employed 450,000 workers. In some industries, the numbers were much higher; in Silicon Valley, the percentage of immigrant-founded startups had increased to 52 percent. Indian immigrants founded 26 percent of these startups—more than the next four groups from Britain, China, Taiwan, and Japan combined.

Right now, there are 1M people waiting for a green card, but only 8,400 issued per country per year (regardless of population, Indian and Chinese immigrants face the same quotas as someone from a smaller country like Eritrea). Sadly, these visa backlogs are creating a massive reverse brain drain as entrepreneurs find it’s far easier to stay home or build elsewhere. As you can imagine, for me, immigration reform is a critical area of focus, so I hope I’ll have more opportunities to lobby for change with our country’s officials.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to open for Guy Kawasaki at TEDxHarkerSchool. This was a completely student-led event for about 200 highschool students interested in entrepreneurship.

There were a number of students who were (openly) running businesses of their own after hours (as you know, I had to hide mine from my parents). Most of these businesses had a social angle to them, which was really surprising and awesome. I especially liked OneThing and Job4Joe.

Harker is a phenomenal school located in San Jose that attracts superhuman kids from all across Silicon Valley. I had a chance to grab lunch with a gang of them after my talk, and I don’t think I’ve laughed so hard at an event before. A super funny and super smart group.

Hanging out and trying to increase my IQ after the event

Thank-you to Neel Bhoopalam and Neeraj Baid for extending the invitation, and everyone who FBed and emailed me after. You guys rock.

Here is the full video (stellar production by Chris Hennessey). You can also find the video on the main TED website here.

The startup scene is thriving in Egypt.

Thanks to USAID, I got to see this firsthand. I was fortunate to spend a full week in Cairo and Alexandria immersing myself in the energy and optimism of a post revolution country. And I couldn’t have picked a better place. Nowhere was there more enthusiasm then in the meeting rooms of the Arab Academy of Science Technology & Maritime Transport during Startup Weekend.

Startup Weekends are 54 hour events where software developers, designers, and marketers come to share ideas, form teams and launch companies. In Alexandria, 300 students were selected from more than several thousand applicants to build and pitch their best startup idea to a panel of pretty elite judges like Ahmad Hamzawi from Google and Hanan Abdel Meguid from OTV Ventures (NYTimes just wrote a fantastic piece on her).

I spent most of my time in between two rooms of the university that housed about 50 teams. Looking around you’d think you were at a hackathon in downtown Palo Alto. The place was electric: students working in pods of four or five, buzzing around, hacking, eating, sleeping, arguing, and pitching each other. Everyone was on Facebook. Kebabs were a plenty. I couldn’t have felt more at home.

Saad Khan and I spoke to the students for about 30-40 minutes each before lunch. Saad is a friend of mine, and rockstar startup guy, venture capitalist and indy film enthusiast from San Francisco. Saad took the angle of a VC and I gave the perspective of an entrepreneur. I think it worked really well. We were followed by Habib Hadad, founder of Yamli.com, an arabic transliteration engine, and popular local entrepreneur who studied at USC and is now back in the Middle East igniting the region’s startup eco-system.

Out of the 50+ teams, most said they felt optimistic about the economic future of Egypt post revolution. However, while entrepreneurship is considered a major driver by many, including the US government who sent me there, the road is anything but easy. Participants cited legal issues, cultural resistance and lack of capital, as some of the main obstacles facing them. From what I saw, like most everyone else, I’m hopeful for change. It’s going to be these young entrepreneurs who will make it happen.

After two and half days of intense effort, it was time to watch the teams present. Most presentations focused on commerce, productivity and mobile apps. However, in the end, the unanimous winner and crowd favorite was Sweet Dreams, a site that lets parents reward their children with online gifts (like unlocking a new level of a game) for chores, homework completion and other achievements.

A major highlight for me actually happened before the winners were announced: while the judges were deliberating, all 300 participants rushed the stage, and celebrated completing the program…behind them fireworks went off outside lighting up the entire sky. What a way to end the night.

A very big thank you to Mike Ducker, the executive-in-residence for the Egypt Competitiveness Project, and Hashem Zahran and team, for hosting and giving me an experience I’ll never forget.

Here’s a great video trailer with footage from the event (you’ll get a great sense for the energy during the weekend!):

Noah and I started Involver because we felt there had to be a better way for brands to engage customers in the social web. As avid consumers of social media, we felt traditional advertising, like banner or text ads, didn’t really fit into the experience. It was clear: social networks needed a new ad format.

Involver Founding Team

Together with a small group of friends, we spent day and night taking on the challenge. We didn’t come from the advertising world, or the media world (or any world really!), we were just a bunch of guys who spent way too much time on Facebook with a relentless passion for making advertising better.

Four and a half years later, this audacious goal has turned into an explosive market category, and Involver is sitting on top of it. One tiny little room crammed with seven starving college grads has expanded to four offices across the country with seventy well-fed super-humans helping more than 500,000 companies power their social marketing campaigns.

The game has changed. We’re playing for keeps.

Today, it’s time to take Involver to the next level.

Let me say with great excitement: Involver has a new CEO, Don Beck. As of today, I’m stepping out of that role so I can concentrate on my duties as Chief Strategist (which is my passion) and my board duties as Chairman (which is my leadership interest).

As our CEO, Don is going to help Involver scale. He’s one of the top enterprise sales executives in the industry. Don will bring the sales and operating leadership our team needs to grow faster and provide a world-class experience for our customers. No doubt about it, this is one of the biggest decisions of my life, and I feel lucky Don’s accepted my offer to accelerate our business. I’ll tell you more about Don in a moment, but let me first tell you some of the amazing things we have accomplished in setting the stage for his leadership.

It’s the Wild, Wild West Out Here

Let’s face it. That’s one of the reasons we love working in social media. Fast innovation. Fierce competition. Limitless possibilities.

Since Involver changed from services to software – becoming a true Software-as-a-Service company rather than an agency like our competitors – we have rocked the market.

In the past 12 months, Involver has:
• Doubled our average deal size and
• Achieved 125%, 140%, and 157% of our quarterly revenue targets

In the last 6 months, we’ve:
• Doubled our gross margins
• Doubled our renewal rate and
• Nearly doubled our monthly recurring revenue

We expect Involver to be profitable by November (we’ll have burned less than two million dollars the whole year!). These are some great stats (I am so proud of our team for putting up these numbers through a business transition). But Involver is a special company, and we want more. Much more.

The Next Stage

Don Beck, President & CEO of Involver

Involver needs a CEO who can help us scale to the next plateau and beyond. When I met Don early this year, something clicked between the two of us – and then with the rest of the management team. I had a good feeling this could be our man.

Don is an MBA grad from Miami University and managed sales at IBM for over fifteen years (back when IBM went off the charts).

But it’s his work over the past decade-and-a-half that distinguishes him as one of the best experts at growing enterprise software and SaaS companies out there today.

• As SVP, Don helped double revenues and scale Postini to a market leader in the web security space – and sold the company to Google for $625M

• Built and led the North American sales and marketing efforts for Adobe

• Generated $79M in software revenue as VP of Channel Sales at J. D. Edwards (now Peoplesoft/Oracle)

• Re-engineered an entire organization, reducing the cost of sales by 30% and getting back to cash flow positive, as EVP of Worldwide Sales at Brio Software

All That, In Ten Years = A Superhuman Talent

Meteoric growth in early 2011 will only increase.

And now we have him ☺

But it’s not just Don’s numbers that impress me. He truly understands the potential at Involver, and he sees all that we have worked so hard for to this point. In his own words, “Involver is on the brink of greatness.”

The Future
Don sees the raw talent we have here at Involver, and he wants to bring more people on. Time to grow. Time to hire. Our current customers will get more value, new customers will help push us to market-leader status, and more investors are going to take note of what we are doing.

Congratulations to everyone!

When we started Involver, we had the idea to make advertising better in social media. This idea has evolved a lot over the past few years, but it seems inevitable that Involver will become the leading enterprise-marketing platform. And with that comes billions in possibilities.

Welcome, Don. We are happy to have you with us on the brink of a new era at Involver. As you know, there’s no limit here in the Wild, Wild West.

Today, we launched perhaps our greatest innovation to-date: SML – the world’s first programming language for developers to build and publish customized social media applications for Facebook.

Coverage from WSJ’s AllThingsD.com: http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/20101208/involver-helps-brands-speak-the-language-of-the-social-web/

“While Involver is profitable today, receiving outside capital is an important and strategic move for any company growing as rapidly as we are,” said Rahim Fazal, co-founder and CEO of Involver. “This new round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, will provide our company with additional opportunities to enhance the value our future and existing customers find in the Involver Platform.”

“In the past few years we’ve watched the social Web—including sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn—turn into an incredibly compelling marketing medium for businesses,” said Bessemer’s Byron Deeter. “There are few other venues where brands can interact so directly, in a one-on-one fashion, with their customers—and find new ones.” Deeter’s Bessemer colleague Philippe Botteri added: “This trend has created an entirely new software category, and Involver is the leading player in it right now. We are proud to back the company and be active in the wider space.” Both Deeter and Botteri are joining Involver’s board as part of the financing.

Involver has quickly become the choice for leading brands and advertising agencies looking for fully customizable, automated solutions to their social media needs. Current customers include Facebook, the White House, Sony/RCA Records and Foster Farms. Involver’s platform currently supports more than 200,000 installed applications and interacts with greater than 325 million social “fans.”

Involver’s platform is sorely needed. Although social media is exploding, many companies today still aren’t sure how to best take advantage of it—and craft marketing campaigns that both produce measurable results and protect their brands. Involver’s technology helps big and small companies do this, allowing brands to do everything from share photos, tweets and whitepapers on social-media sites to offer coupons, polls and even customized “landing pages” for visitors. Brands using Involver’s Audience Management Platform benefit from the ability to create and optimize unique social-media experiences for millions of brand advocates on social sites, all from within an easy to manage dashboard.
About Involver
Involver is the web’s most trusted social media platform, providing applications and monitoring tools to over 100,000 brands and agencies to manage a total audience of 325 million plus fans. We power over 200,000 applications that encompass a complete range of social media functions. Involver’s Audience Management Platform is the world’s most effective way for agencies and their clients to publish, monitor, measure, and manage social media content across multiple social networks from one central dashboard. Our technology and audience engagement tools make it easy to ramp up your marketing on social networks and implement highly effective options to promote brand identity in this new climate of two-way communication. Involver is a Facebook Preferred Developer, a technology provider for Facebook’s internal marketing team, and has been recognized by Amazon as one of the most innovative companies on their Cloud Computing platform. Involver is the trusted partner of the world’s top brands and agencies including Facebook, Sony/RCA Records, The White House and EVB. Learn more at www.involver.com.