Don’t Pivot Too Soon: ADARA Co-Founder and CTO Charles Mi (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: They’re all doing this. They’re all part of your marketplace now.

Charles Mi: Yes. ADARA marketplace contains a lot of the travel technology companies, rental cars, and hotels. They have 100% control over how the data is being used. By putting transparency and control in place, the data suppliers have a lot of confidence that the data won’t be misused.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. In terms of building the company, you switched in 2008 to this travel data mode. Now, it’s coming up to seven years of executing on this business plan. You said you raised three rounds of financing?

Charles Mi: Since 2008, yes.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of financing have you raised? How much money have yourraised and how are the players?

Charles Mi: We raised a total of $44.5 million.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a lot.

Charles Mi: Some of our investors include Morgenthaler, August Capital, and ONSET Ventures. Our newest investors was QuestMark. Before them, we also raised from Baseline Ventures and a series of other smaller institutions.

Sramana Mitra: What stage are you at this point? Are you approaching an IPO? You can give whatever metrics is comfortable for you.

Charles Mi: We’re at a stage where we see this as a public company. Currently, the market is not very friendly to marketing or ad tech companies. Even though we don’t see ourselves as an ad tech company, there’s big revenue coming from there. We’re at a stage where we continue to innovate our products and to be the dominant player not only in the US market but also in the global market. There is still a lot of room for growth.

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting in your story that you would like to share?

Charles Mi: There are a lot of interesting stories. One thing that’s interesting is like typical startups, you have a pivot. The pivoting part is always the difficult piece. Even when we were executing the idea, we were not focused enough and were trying a lot of different things. The hard truth is that, for many startups, you do have to pivot. How do you pivot? Part of that is you have to have patience to get to that perfect storm. Part of it also is giving yourself an opportunity to enter a different market.

Sramana Mitra: Pivot is complicated because you have to give it enough time so that you don’t end up with a false negative either. The point at which you decide to pivot needs to be chosen very carefully. You have to give your first idea enough time to fully understand and negate that idea.

In your case, your pivot strategy led to your working with these large airlines and selling them a concept that they did not have any idea about. You were selling them a new way of looking at stuff. Just getting meetings at this level takes so much time. If you abandon an idea just because it’s taking you long to get meetings, then you get lots of false negatives.

Charles Mi: There’s a lot of patience involved. There’s no right or wrong formula. Even today, when we’re thinking backwards, we ask ourselves if we gave up our search idea too quickly. At that moment, you just want to make sure that there’s a little bit of judgement. It’s a difficult decision but at the same time, you have to have patience. It’s hard to describe.

Sramana Mitra: It’s subjective. You have to take a bunch of parameters into account.

Charles Mi: Exactly. It definitely does not sound cool. It doesn’t sound like, “We pivoted because we saw this bright unicorn.” There’s no such thing. You never see a bright unicorn. You have to go for it. When we pivoted, it went through a lot of discussions and thinking.

Sramana Mitra: What I see in the market is, because of this popularity of the lean startup methodology, people are too eager to pivot. It’s almost like they’re looking for instant gratification. If they don’t find instant gratification, pivot. I don’t think that’s how you build great companies.

Charles Mi: Exactly. When you’re working with airlines, the cycle is very long. You do have to have patience.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely. It probably took six to nine months of selling to even get them to come around and accept your value proposition. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Don’t Pivot Too Soon: ADARA Co-Founder and CTO Charles Mi
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