Billion Dollar Unicorns: How Marketo Is Faring In The Public Market

Last year, we began tracking some Unicorn companies – essentially organizations with billion dollar plus valuations – inspired by a TechCrunch article by Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures. Some of these Unicorn companies went public last year and have reasserted their high valuations. One such company on my radar is digital marketing solutions provider Marketo (Nasdaq:MKTO). The case study of the company’s founding and entrepreneurial journey is featured in my new book, Billion Dollar Unicorns.

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Serial Entrepreneur Building a Luxury Business: Trevor Traina, CEO of IfOnly (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is your customer acquisition strategy?

Trevor Traina: We have a two-part strategy. The first is we partner with a lot of high-caliber organizations like American Express. We’ve partnered with them particularly for their premium cardholders. We work with Sotheby’s for their top collectors worldwide. We work with private clubs in different organizations. We offer a level of access, which we call membership, which is our most premium access through our partners. The second part of our strategy is that we leverage our participants. We call them luminaries. When we add a new luminary on the platform, they go out to their social media following and alert them as to what they’re doing on IfOnly.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. In terms of building this company, what has been your financing strategy? I imagine you bootstrapped it to get the proof of concept. After that, what happened?
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Building an Internet of Things Platform Company from Zaragoza, Spain: Alicia Asin, CEO of Libelium (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Other than universities, are there any other vertical trends that you see in terms of kinds of companies – retail, logistics, or healthcare? Where are you seeing the projects?

Alicia Asin: Because we are a horizontal platform, we have customers not only in universities but also in system integrators and communication companies.

Sramana Mitra: I understand. This is more of a trend question. What kinds of killer apps are you seeing? What segments are coming up with IoT killer apps than others.

Alicia Asin: The first one is Smart cities. It’s a dynamic segment in the IoT. It’s surprising that agriculture seems to be a mature market where we also have a lot of innovators willing to test technologies.
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Building an Internet of Things Platform Company from Zaragoza, Spain: Alicia Asin, CEO of Libelium (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Somehow, you managed to get through 2007 and 2008. At what point and what strategic moves did you make to get to a more sustainable path?

Alicia Asin: I think it was 2009. Through the maker shop, we were able to sustain the salaries of all the personnel. We were 10 people by 2009. We launched our official business line, which is the biggest one now and the one that is generating 70% of the revenues. I think that was the inflection point for us.

Sramana Mitra: When did you figure out that product – the product that today is generating 70% of the revenue? What was the process in figuring out the precise specs and product/market fit of that one? That’s the real business builder, right?
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Serial Entrepreneur Building a Luxury Business: Trevor Traina, CEO of IfOnly (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: It’s so hard to get that timing right, isn’t it?

Trevor Traina: It’s hard to get the timing perfect, but I find that if you really listen to your inner voice and talk to other people, you can pretty much figure out which spaces are important and growing and which spaces aren’t. I counsel friends and entrepreneurs who are looking to do new endeavors. I always say, “Let’s look at the space. Is this an area where there’s an opportunity?” I always tell people that if you pick the area of opportunity, you’ll have five times the result by working just as hard.

The other thing I learned is that one should always be honest about where their skills and desires lie. Being a CEO is a very specific skill set. Being a founder is a very specific skill set and it’s not for everyone. >>>

Building an Internet of Things Platform Company from Zaragoza, Spain: Alicia Asin, CEO of Libelium (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to that November 2006 time frame. You decided you were going to do an IoT platform. How did you get the company off the ground? Was it self-financed, bootstrapped, or did you raise money? How did you get going? What was the process of getting this started?

Alicia Asin: We had two very clear ideas. The first one was that we didn’t want to risk the money of our families or friends. We wanted to be in this alone. The second thing was that we didn’t want to be the typical R&D company that allows itself not to produce any revenues because it’s an R&D company. We focused on creating revenues and getting all the resources that we could. First of all, we applied for as many entrepreneur awards and grants that we could. By the second year, we had already raised $100,000 from different institutions just by winning awards. If you go to our website, you will see that we have 27 awards. My co-founder was the winner of the Innovator of the Year by MIT two years ago. That was one part.

Sramana Mitra: How much money were you able to gather by winning these awards?
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Unicorn in The Making: Ross Mason, Founder of MuleSoft (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about what made that a successful transition? What did you do as a founder? What did your new CEO do as the incoming CEO? Obviously, it has been a successful transition since you’re working with this person for a while.

Ross Mason: A few things. Bringing someone new in is always a risk and a challenge. It’s not just the CEO but it’s the team around the CEO as well that really matters. He used to work at SpringSource and the CEO of SpringSource was a friend of mine. This was an open source company around the Spring framework that had a pretty good exit. Rod, the CEO at SpringSource recommended Greg. >>>

Serial Entrepreneur Building a Luxury Business: Trevor Traina, CEO of IfOnly (Part 1)

Trevor has built several businesses and is now working in a segment that he naturally aligns with—luxury experiences.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised?

Trevor Traina: I was born and raised in San Francisco. On my father’s side, I’m a fourth-generation San Franciscan.

Sramana Mitra: Wow! That’s a rarity around here.

Trevor Traina: Yes it is. I was here through high school. Then, I went to Princeton for my undergraduate studies. Then I went immediately to Oxford to St. Catherine’s College where I got a graduate degree in Social Studies. Then I worked in New York for three years.
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