Don’t Pivot Too Soon: ADARA Co-Founder and CTO Charles Mi (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What happened to that company?

Charles Mi: We lasted for three and a half years. It was a very interesting idea, but we didn’t really discover the business potential. We also tried to make different things at a time instead of focusing on one thing. We were doing three different products at the same time. We were also doing advertising and analytics.

What happened was some of the key data sources that we had went away, one of which was Myspace. We crawl the profiles and also get lots of information from blogging platforms like Live Journal, Bazinga, and also MSN 360. A lot of these blogging platforms also went away. Our data sources dropped significantly, making our search engine a little insignificant.

One thing I discovered in Opinmind was that when data sources connect to each other, they get a lot more powerful. Layton had a lot of experience in the travel space. He said, “There is actually a lot of data in the travel supply world where the data just sits in the hard drive. We said, “Why don’t we build a beta platform only for the traveling industry? Why don’t we first ease their minds of sharing data?” Travel data is very synergistic, how do we maximize the potential of those data? That’s basically the inception of ADARA in 2009.

Sramana Mitra: Just to make sure that I understand the picture, Opinmind started with a certain concept. You morphed that to a travel industry-specific vertical solution. That became what today is ADARA?

Charles Mi: That’s correct. We had an interesting idea. We were trying to do search engine and analytics. At Opinmind, we actually gained insight on how data is being used. Thanks to Layton and to our understanding of one particular vertical, we found out that travel data is actually one that is very interesting and exciting for us.

Sramana Mitra: What is the structure of this company that we are discussing? We are talking 2008 to 2009 time frame when you were doing the re-purposing of the company. You had investors from Opinmind who were washed out at this point?

Charles Mi: Not really washed out. When we pivoted, the existing investors put in more money. Two years into it, there was another round of investment to continue our transition. Two years ago, we got another round of investment to continue and drive our growth.

Sramana Mitra: The existing investors basically bought into your pivot strategy and found the new positioning sufficiently interesting that they put more money in. You basically restarted the company with existing investors and then went on to build from there.

Charles Mi: Yes, exactly.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Don’t Pivot Too Soon: ADARA Co-Founder and CTO Charles Mi
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