I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I am about art and culture. In this series, I will typically publish a piece of art – one of my paintings – and I request you to spend a minute or two deeply meditating on it. I urge you to watch your feelings, thoughts, reactions to the piece, and write what comes to you, what thoughts it triggers, in the dialog area. Let us see what stimulation this interaction yields. For today – Icy Night I
Icy Night I | Sramana Mitra, 2022 | Watercolor, Ink | 8 x 8, On Paper
Sramana Mitra: So let’s go to the new one. What’s happening with the new one?
Adam Robinson: I wanted to scale up Retention.com, but I’d never done it before, so I was very insecure about it. I convinced Santosh Sharan to join us as our COO. He’d helped ZoomInfo grow from $8 million to $100 million ARR. He had helped this company Apollo.io turnaround from being stuck at $6 million ARR for five years to being valued at around a billion dollars in a Sequoia led round.
>>>I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I am about art and culture. In this series, I will typically publish a piece of art – one of my paintings – and I request you to spend a minute or two deeply meditating on it. I urge you to watch your feelings, thoughts, reactions to the piece, and write what comes to you, what thoughts it triggers, in the dialog area. Let us see what stimulation this interaction yields. For today – Tenderness
Tenderness | Sramana Mitra, 2022 | Watercolor, Ink | 8 x 8, On Paper
Sramana Mitra: This one is called Retention.com now, right?
Adam Robinson: GetEmails at the end of 2022 focused only on these e-commerce stores. Then we added another product suite, which was a big product upgrade. Not only were we giving people emails to email for workflows like abandoned cart, abandoned product, or abandoned website, our identity product can also do audience expansion for them.
>>>In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:
During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Ashish Gupta, Partner at Clearvision Ventures. Ashish has been in the industry for a long time and has an interesting perspective on AI investing.
HabitHalo
For our entrepreneur pitch, we had Phil Tran from Indianapolis, Indiana, pitch HabitHalo. We discussed his pre-seed fundraising strategy.
You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:
Recently, Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) announced its second quarter results that beat the market expectations and helped the stock climb 4% in the after-hours trading session. The company remains focused on AI, and recently announced the acquisition of Tenyx to continue to add to its AI portfolio.
>>>Sramana Mitra: Well, I think what you’re pointing out is that if your ad can rattle people enough to get them to comment, it’s with comments and discussions in social media posts that you get distribution. That’s what snowballed the algorithm distribution. So by rattling these people, you were getting that distribution. So whether people liked it, resonated with it or not, you were getting distribution, you were getting your ad in front of enough people who actually were interested in buying.
Adam Robinson: I think a mistake that people can make is that it’s not good for your brand. But when you’re starting a startup, you don’t have a brand. I don’t think you have a brand to ruin until you’re like well past $10 million ARR.
>>>