What Do Google, Omniture and Mint.com Have in Common?

From Jay Turo, President and Co-Founder of Growthink

Google. Omniture. Mint.com. All massive private company investing success stories and all shared some critical characteristics:

1. They all took a while to blossom. In the case of Omniture, it was 13 long years from company founding to exit last week via sale to Adobe for $1.8 billion.

2. Those that made the most money by far were those that got in early. Sure, it would have been great to have owned Google at its 2004 IPO price of $85/share, but some of the FIRST investors in Google in 1998 bought their shares - on a split-adjusted basis - at eight CENTS/share.

3. All had/have great leaders. Josh James, founder and CEO of Omniture, has led his company through a failed acquisition, through having to lay off 3/4 of the company's employees a week before Christmas, an IPO, and attracting the best software talent far from Silicon Valley (in Omniture's case, suburban Utah).

4. Lady luck smiled on them. In the case of Mint.com, Intuit's inability to move their key personal financial software apps to the "cloud" (in spite of having 100 x more software developers working on it than Mint) was the key stroke of luck that led to Intuit buying them in September for $170 million.

The key question with luck, always, is how we can make it work for us. And the stories of Google's, Omniture's, and Mint.com's success point the way.

Thursday 11/5 Webinar: Keys to Successful Private Company Investing

Please join me on Thursday, November 5th, at 10 am PST / 1pm EST on a live, interactive web conference where I will share with you my keys to successful private company investing including:

- How to utilize the Internet to source and research opportunities
- How to conduct data-driven risk analysis on private company deals
- How to exploit the "pricing inefficiency gap" endemic to private equity
- The importance of technology bias (and which technologies to bias) when selecting deals
- How to properly apply "black swan," or "randomness" thinking to private company investing strategy

Jay Turo
CEO
Growthink, Inc.

From Dave Lavinsky, Co-Founder and President of Growthink

Entrepreneurs must have many skills. They must be able to spot opportunities. They must be able to create plans to seize those opportunities. And they must execute on those plans.

And, for most opportunities, and clearly for those opportunities that are really big, execution involves hiring and managing employees. Because no single entrepreneur can do everything themselves.

But you just can't have any employees. Companies that succeed have employees that are highly motivated.

So how do you ensure that your employees are motivated to succeed?

What Do Google, Omniture and Mint.com Have in Common?

From Jay Turo, President and Co-Founder of Growthink

Google. Omniture. Mint.com. All massive private company investing success stories and all shared some critical characteristics:

1. They all took a while to blossom. In the case of Omniture, it was 13 long years from company founding to exit last week via sale to Adobe for $1.8 billion.

2. Those that made the most money by far were those that got in early. Sure, it would have been great to have owned Google at its 2004 IPO price of $85/share, but some of the FIRST investors in Google in 1998 bought their shares - on a split-adjusted basis - at eight CENTS/share.

3. All had/have great leaders. Josh James, founder and CEO of Omniture, has led his company through a failed acquisition, through having to lay off 3/4 of the company's employees a week before Christmas, an IPO, and attracting the best software talent far from Silicon Valley (in Omniture's case, suburban Utah).

4. Lady luck smiled on them. In the case of Mint.com, Intuit's inability to move their key personal financial software apps to the "cloud" (in spite of having 100 x more software developers working on it than Mint) was the key stroke of luck that led to Intuit buying them in September for $170 million.

The key question with luck, always, is how we can make it work for us. And the stories of Google's, Omniture's, and Mint.com's success point the way.

Thursday 11/5 Webinar: Keys to Successful Private Company Investing

Please join me on Thursday, November 5th, at 10 am PST / 1pm EST on a live, interactive web conference where I will share with you my keys to successful private company investing including:

- How to utilize the Internet to source and research opportunities
- How to conduct data-driven risk analysis on private company deals
- How to exploit the "pricing inefficiency gap" endemic to private equity
- The importance of technology bias (and which technologies to bias) when selecting deals
- How to properly apply "black swan," or "randomness" thinking to private company investing strategy

Jay Turo
CEO
Growthink, Inc.

From Dave Lavinsky, Co-Founder and President of Growthink

Entrepreneurs must have many skills. They must be able to spot opportunities. They must be able to create plans to seize those opportunities. And they must execute on those plans.

And, for most opportunities, and clearly for those opportunities that are really big, execution involves hiring and managing employees. Because no single entrepreneur can do everything themselves.

But you just can't have any employees. Companies that succeed have employees that are highly motivated.

So how do you ensure that your employees are motivated to succeed?