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Don Mathis

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Lessons From The Front…

…  musings from a career in entrepreneurship, big business and the Navy.

 

@Mathis_DHM

  • Go Navy!! twitter.com/comcastmilitar… 1 day ago
  • RT @BluVector: The #BluTeam believes heavily in giving back to our community during this time of year. Recently, our staff joined together… 1 day ago
  • RT @BluVector: New downloader named #Buer, created for ease of use in malware-as-a-service (#MaaS), has been in the wild since August. BluV… 1 day ago
  • RT @QuilHealth: Says @cedwardski, CEO of @QuilHealth: "People want to be healthy." #Technology can be key in closing the healthcare dispari… 1 day ago
  • RT @QuilHealth: Quil #WinterWellness Tip 3: Having trouble getting your steps in when it's cold outside? Walking around the mall holiday sh… 1 day ago
  • Social determinants for healthcare matter: 8 solutions that can be implemented right now. linkedin.com/pulse/social-d… via @LinkedIn 5 days ago
  • RT @chrissyfarr: Story I keep hearing over and over in various forms: oftentimes it’s the low-tech, services-based interventions that work:… 6 days ago
  • RT @NBCUVetNet: We will never forget. twitter.com/nbcnews/status… 1 week ago
  • RT @BluVector: A new variant of #Sodinokibi #ransomware has reportedly hit CyrusOne data centers. We tested BluVector’s Machine Learning en… 1 week ago
  • RT @BluVector: Heading to #SANS Cyber Defense Initiative 2019 in #DC next week? If you're looking to improve the threat detection of your c… 1 week ago
Follow @Mathis_DHM

Lessons From The Front…

…  musings from a career in entrepreneurship, big business and the Navy.

 

@Mathis_DHM

  • Go Navy!! twitter.com/comcastmilitar… 1 day ago
  • RT @BluVector: The #BluTeam believes heavily in giving back to our community during this time of year. Recently, our staff joined together… 1 day ago
  • RT @BluVector: New downloader named #Buer, created for ease of use in malware-as-a-service (#MaaS), has been in the wild since August. BluV… 1 day ago
  • RT @QuilHealth: Says @cedwardski, CEO of @QuilHealth: "People want to be healthy." #Technology can be key in closing the healthcare dispari… 1 day ago
  • RT @QuilHealth: Quil #WinterWellness Tip 3: Having trouble getting your steps in when it's cold outside? Walking around the mall holiday sh… 1 day ago
  • Social determinants for healthcare matter: 8 solutions that can be implemented right now. linkedin.com/pulse/social-d… via @LinkedIn 5 days ago
  • RT @chrissyfarr: Story I keep hearing over and over in various forms: oftentimes it’s the low-tech, services-based interventions that work:… 6 days ago
  • RT @NBCUVetNet: We will never forget. twitter.com/nbcnews/status… 1 week ago
  • RT @BluVector: A new variant of #Sodinokibi #ransomware has reportedly hit CyrusOne data centers. We tested BluVector’s Machine Learning en… 1 week ago
  • RT @BluVector: Heading to #SANS Cyber Defense Initiative 2019 in #DC next week? If you're looking to improve the threat detection of your c… 1 week ago
Follow @Mathis_DHM

Tag: Internet marketing

Maybe there is no “Series A Crunch”. But it still ain’t easy.

 

Don Mathis Kinetic Social Series A Crunch!

For the last few years, the venture capital and start-up community have exhaustively explored the idea that there is a “Series A crunch”. Opinions differ – sometimes sharply – on the topic.

As Inc. magazine described it:

It goes like this: After slogging through six months to a year of frenzied product development and user testing, seed-funded tech start-ups are fatally hitting a wall — the million to several million dollars in VC funding they need to scale up their cool new services is nowhere to be found. The result is the cruel and needless throttling of a vast stream of promising fledgling companies down to a mere trickle of survivors. Share of seed-funded companies that won’t be able to get follow-on funding: 61%.

Don Mathis Kinetic Social_Series A Shadow of Death
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of start-up death…

In mid-2014, William Hsu of Mucker Capital wrote in re/code:  “the distance between that “eureka” moment when an entrepreneur has an idea, to getting funded by a seed-stageinstitutional VC, has become the valley of death — littered with companies that just simply could not get off the ground with little fanfare, attention, or data.”

With 2014 being a massive year for tech M&A, some of the Series A crunch concerns have been alleviated by the availability of early stage “acqui-hire” exits; as Jacob Mullins notes in Business Insider, “Google, Facebook, and Twitter cut the path for the acqui-hire and eased the Series A crunch.”

So maybe there is no crunch, or if there is, it isn’t the horrific “valley of death” that some believe. But crunch or no, from my experience it is certainly difficult.

My company, Kinetic Social, raised its Series A in May, 2013 – a combination of equity and venture debt. We raised our Series B in early 2014, all equity and substantially larger ($18 million versus $8 million). And yet, while both were challenging, the Series A was definitely the harder raise.

Why? In our case, there were at least three significant challenges to surmount:

  1. We were out raising money from entirely new investors, pitching our company to venture investors who had barely heard of us.
  2. We were operating in a sector (paid social advertising) that was largely unproven at that time.
  3. We operated in a crowded industry segment with literally dozens of companies (50+ in our space) that had some form of seed or early stage capital… and some that were further along than that. As AdExchanger’s Zach Rogers puts it: “To many, it seems the landscape of social ad buying platforms has been rapidly commoditized … But Kinetic is betting that it’s early innings for social marketing, and that the winners will bring special-sauce optimization to multiple APIs.”

Don Mathis Kinetic Social, Social Media OpportunityWe were indeed betting on the “early innings” concept Zach suggested. Moreover, we were convinced: 1) what we had already built at Kinetic would command an investment from a smart venture capital firm; and 2) Kinetic would stand out from the pack with a clearly differentiated product and solution. In effect, we were going to market to ask (new) investors to pick us as the likely winners in our crowded space.

Fortunately, it worked. But it wasn’t easy. We contacted about 60 firms, pitched to 30 or so, and ended up with three term sheets – all in roughly one year’s time.  Our conviction got us through the process – we believed we were on to something substantial. The combination of a talented team and a strong market opportunity propelled us to realize our vision.

It also helped – a lot – that the market for our services began to shift in our direction. In particular, social media advertising began to evolve from being a primarily earned (free) media model to a primarily paid advertising model. And while we weren’t surprised, we spent a long time in 2012 and early 2013 hoping the pace of this change would accelerate. We began to see it in early 2013 – it’s no coincidence that we closed the Series A shortly thereafter.

Bottom line? The Series A is hard, but raising it simply means you must prove that you have something real. Once you do this, once you prove that there is a bona fide market opportunity for your idea, there is smart capital out there to back your enterprise.

Follow Don on Twitter @KineticDHM   ///   Connect with Don on Google+

Don Mathis is the CEO and Co-Founder of Kinetic Social, a social data and technology company focused on making sense of the world’s social signal. He also serves in the US Navy on reserve duty, where he is an Expeditionary Combat Logistics & Anti-Terrorism Officer.

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Posted on January 20, 2015April 14, 2018Categories PostsTags Ad:tech, AdExchanger, Business, Don Mathis, Don Mathis Kinetic, Don Mathis Kinetic Social, entrepreneurship, Facebook, Internet marketing, Kinetic, Leadership, Management, Mathis, Series A, Series B, social, Social marketing, Social media marketing, Start-up, Twitter, Venture capital, Zach Rodgers

Don Mathis on OMMA Social Panel

Catharine P. Taylor moderates a panel discussing the future of Facebook were they to launch an online ad network.

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Posted on September 16, 2014April 14, 2018Categories VideoTags Ad:tech, advertising, Don Mathis Kinetic Social, Facebook, Internet marketing, Kinetic Social, Social media marketingLeave a comment on Don Mathis on OMMA Social Panel

“How do YOU define leadership?” (In A Tweet)

Harvard Business School

Harvard Business School managed a Twitter conversation with alumni recently, asking the question “How Do YOU Define Leadership?” There are a lot of smart responses in the Storify version of the dialog. It isn’t easy to say something thoughtful about such a broad subject in 140 characters, but many folks did!

Here are my own responses from the Storify / Twitter conversation:

Q: "How do YOU define leadership?"

— HBS Alumni (@HBSAlumni) September 13, 2013

@HBSAlumni Inspiring a group of people / team to accomplish a mission. Any team, any mission, any context.

— Don Mathis (@KineticDHM) September 13, 2013

.@KineticDHM thanks for joining the chat! We're curious..what types of leadership challenges do you face and how do you address them?

— HBS Alumni (@HBSAlumni) September 14, 2013

@HBSAlumni My challenge is a tech start-up. Like pushing Sisyphus’ boulder… Rest a bit, it rolls backwards. Rest more, it rolls over you.

— Don Mathis (@KineticDHM) September 14, 2013

@HBSAlumni momentum is everything & flows from leadership. Leadership = getting the team & ALL stakeholders motivated around the vision.

— Don Mathis (@KineticDHM) September 14, 2013

@HBSAlumni As R. Kaplan says, you motivate around vision by (over) communication. Time enough in a day to do that = my biggest challenge.

— Don Mathis (@KineticDHM) September 14, 2013

.@KineticDHM thanks for such thoughtful responses! FYI, in case you didn't know Robert Kaplan is on Twitter at @RobSKaplan 🙂

— HBS Alumni (@HBSAlumni) September 14, 2013

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Posted on September 21, 2013April 14, 2018Categories PostsTags Don Mathis, Don Mathis Kinetic Social, entrepreneurship, Facebook, Harvard Business School, Internet marketing, Kinetic, Leadership, Management, Mathis, Online Communities, PMD, Social Media, Social media marketing, Social Networking, Storify, Twitter

Beyond the Big Three Social Networks

By Don Mathis, Kinetic Social CEO

The accelerating monetization initiatives of the social media “Big Three” – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – have received a fair share of headlines recently. But what does the rest of the pack of social media players have up their sleeves? Keep reading…

This post has been moved to my industry-focused blog, “Silicon Alley Considered: Observations from the grittier tech space.” You can click on the link to keep reading.

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Posted on July 31, 2013April 14, 2018Categories PostsTags Ad:tech, ad:tech sector, AdExchanger, advertising, Big Three, brands, CEO, co-founder, customers, Dennis Crowley, Don Mathis, Don Mathis Kinetic Social, Facebook, Foursquare, Internet marketing, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Social marketing, Social Media, Tumblr, Twitter2 Comments on Beyond the Big Three Social Networks
“It’s the Advice, Stupid”

“It’s the Advice, Stupid”

By Don Mathis, Kinetic Social CEO

Earlier this week, we began to hear more details regarding the changes Facebook has made to the Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program, in particular as these changes will relate to both the initial application to the PMD program as well as to the recertification process for existing badge holders. Keep reading…

This post has been moved to my industry-focused blog, “Silicon Alley Considered: Observations from the grittier tech space.” You can click on the link to keep reading.

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Posted on March 5, 2013April 14, 2018Categories PostsTags Ad:tech, AdExchanger, Business, Don Mathis, Don Mathis Kinetic Social, entrepreneurship, Facebook, Internet marketing, Kinetic, Kinetic & Related Stories, Mathis, PMD, social, Social marketing, Social Media, Social media marketing, Start-up, Zach Rodgers1 Comment on “It’s the Advice, Stupid”

Atlas (Socially) Unshrugged …

By Don Mathis, Kinetic Social CEO

I was speaking to an investor in one of the Facebook PMD players last year, and he told me that his portfolio company was “going to be the Atlas of Social Media.” My response was that Facebook already was the Atlas of social (at least, of its own social media). Now, it is also the Atlas of Atlas … which means, of the open display & mobile web.

It is a brilliant transaction if Facebook executes well. Keep reading…

This post has been moved to my industry-focused blog, “Silicon Alley Considered: Observations from the grittier tech space.” You can click on the link to keep reading.

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Posted on March 1, 2013April 14, 2018Categories PostsTags Ad:tech, AdExchanger, Atlas, Don Mathis, Don Mathis Kinetic Social, Facebook, Internet marketing, Kinetic, Kinetic & Related Stories, Mathis, Microsoft, social, Social Media, Social media marketing, Zach Rodgers4 Comments on Atlas (Socially) Unshrugged …

From Chaos to Sanity: Facebook Modifies PMD Program

By Don Mathis, Kinetic Social CEO

On Feb 13th, Business Insider broke a story about Facebook changing its PMD program that caught the attention of a lot of people in the social ad:tech space. AdExchanger picked up on the story as well. What’s going on? Facebook has changed the rules regarding new entrants to its Preferred Marketing Developer program – the single most important program for a company like my own, Kinetic Social, for conducting advertising on Facebook. Keep reading…

This post has been moved to my industry-focused blog, “Silicon Alley Considered: Observations from the grittier tech space.” You can click on the link to keep reading.

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Posted on February 14, 2013April 14, 2018Categories PostsTags AdExchanger, Don Mathis, Don Mathis Kinetic Social, Facebook, Internet marketing, Kinetic & Related Stories, LUMA, Lumascape, Mathis, PMD, Social marketing, Social Media, Twitter, Zach Rodgers3 Comments on From Chaos to Sanity: Facebook Modifies PMD Program

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