Bootstrapping Using Services: Manish Sood, CEO of Reltio (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you’re trying to do that, are you then saying that you are going out into the social web to pull all that data? For instance, my private bank is Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley doesn’t have any of that information unless they go into my LinkedIn graph.

Manish Sood: Even before you go to the LinkedIn graph, there is a lot of information within the bank itself. For example, when you bank with Morgan Stanley, they have information on the different kinds of accounts that you have. You’ve already provided information about who’s the beneficiary on those accounts. If you have a trust, who’s the trustee? Who’s the lawyer on that trust? You have also probably provided your place of employment. There is public information available about who else works at that organization. If you start connecting those dots even without stepping into Facebook or LinkedIn type of social media sites, there is a lot of information that sits within these enterprise organizations, but it’s in different silos and different applications. >>>

Building Significant Revenue with Inbound Marketing from Israel: Pepperi CEO Ofer Yourvexel (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Was there also a visual merchandising element to the segments you were working with?

Ofer Yourvexel: Definitely. It’s not just about the product. The brand managers want to control the way their retailers are presenting it. There is an element of making sure that the retailers are complying with the way that they promised to present it and to track what the competitors are doing. You get it from the field. There’s a lot of merchandising features in the segment. They are not the typical features that you’ll find in traditional CRMs.

Sramana Mitra: Who were your first customers? You said people were downloading the app from the app store. How did they find out that such a product was there? Did you do any kind of marketing? How did you acquire these customers and who were the first adopters? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Rich Kahn, CEO of eZanga (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What scale are you at now? How big a company are you now?

Rich Kahn: There’s about 40 of us in the company. We’ve been in the same building now for probably seven years. Our first building was small. We outgrew it quickly and built a much bigger building.

Sramana Mitra: Are you a $10 million dollar company, $50 million dollar company, or $100 million dollar company?

Rich Kahn: Depending on the year, we’re between $8 million and $10 million. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Rich Kahn, CEO of eZanga (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that you’re able to intercept the traffic before that traffic catches your client’s websites?

Rich Kahn: Yes, exactly. We place out an ad on the publisher’s site. The click takes place. That click has to go through our system for billing purposes. Before we go to the billing process, we go through our entire analysis to see if that click is good or bad, and we’re able to do the entire analysis in under 20 milliseconds. We got it fine-tuned, and it took years to get it down to that speed. We wanted it to be nice and quick. Once it identifies it’s good, then we’ll send it to the billing system. We’re intercepting the click before they even see it. This way, they don’t get affected either by paying for the click or if it’s a type of traffic that’s going to inject code into their site, we’re preventing that as well.

Sramana Mitra: You are capable of handling both types of fraudulent traffic that the client should not be built for as well as the ones that can potentially infect the client. >>>

Building Significant Revenue with Inbound Marketing from Israel: Pepperi CEO Ofer Yourvexel (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Before we get into the new venture story, you mentioned that you ran two startups while you were in the US. Were they companies that you founded or recruited to run? How did those come about? It sounds like that’s where you got some of your entrepreneurial experience as well.

Ofer Yourvexel: The first one was an engineering company in the semiconductor industry. I was very young. It was a well-established engineering company in Israel. I was the first VP there. It was not a startup. It was more of an engineering company. Enigma was a startup. I basically knew some of the founders. It was more of a relationship. One of the founders who right now lives in New York has a Ph.D. from MIT. He’s a very good friend of mine from school. He offered me to manage the US operations, but I wasn’t one of the founders in that startup.

Sramana Mitra: But you had a bit of an experience of being in a small company?

Ofer Yourvexel: Yes. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Rich Kahn, CEO of eZanga (Part 3)

Rich Kahn: In addition, we’ve got somewhere around 3,000 plus unique sources of traffic coming in on our network. We’re monitoring every one of those sources and every single click coming into the network. There’s about two billion queries coming into the network. We use predictive analytics to identify a source’s likelihood to convert. This is pretty unique. What it does is when traffic comes in, we eliminate anything that’s fake, so we know that the traffic that gets to our clients is real. That’s step one.

Step two is what is that traffic good for. Is it just window shoppers who are just browsing the Internet to look at different things? That’s great for branding type of campaigns. Then we have people who are spending money and buying things. That’s more of our premium network where people are focused on spending money and interacting. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Daniel Raskin, VP of Strategy at ForgeRock (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How does your identity work? From the perspective of each unit that is being identified, people are capturing different types of data. The parameters that are being captured from that identity point of view is different. Is that something that is customizable in your solution and that’s up to the industry vertical to configure?

Daniel Raskin: We approach that from a conceptual standpoint. We are making a different assumption around identity data than people have been making in the past. In the past, they’ve been saying, “You need an identity store where you store everything in one area.” This isn’t realistic. You go into enterprises and they have data that they have to pull from databases, directories, and all kinds of things. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Rich Kahn, CEO of eZanga (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What I’m trying to understand is what is the philosophy. What drives this cleansing? What are the things that you’re looking for? What kinds of issues are you trying to cleanse out in that process?

Rich Kahn: What you’re asking for is the secret sauce. I’ll be honest with you. If I said to you, “We are looking for the color purple floating through our click stream because we know that the color purple is a bad color on our network.” The people who are writing this fraudulent technology know to not make their traffic purple. They get around your system. >>>