Sebastian Fittko’s posterous

I had an interesting conversation the other day with a colleague about the challenges he was having with his company’s leads pipeline. He had the contacts, but the opportunities weren’t growing fast enough.

I’ve actually seen this many times. The assumption is that once an initial outreach has been done to new contacts, the conversion has to happen fast. If it doesn’t, they’re considered a dead lead and the general thinking is that spending too much time on them is wasted effort. This can also apply to leads that convert to opportunities but get stuck in an early stage in the pipeline.

While a strong contact database can be a real asset to the company, tapping into its value depends upon having a good strategy for lead nurturing. The best way to do that is to think like an editor, not a marketer.

The key to success isn’t abandoning these highly valuable contacts, but rather spending time organizing them and building a relationship based on relevant, interesting content.

Think of your job as the publisher of a niche magazine of news, commentary and insights into your company’s technology domain and prospects industry. This allows you to connect to your audience and become their trusted source of information and solutions to address their problems.

Here are some good strategies for publishing your niche magazine and implementing a successful lead nurturing program.

•    Understand and group your audience – Don’t treat your audience all the same. Identify the most common characteristics among the companies in your leads database and group them accordingly. These groupings can be by industry, size of company, key problem they are solving and many other characteristics.

•    Identify an editorial content strategy - Don’t just send e-mail blasts with marketing promotional offers. Report and comment on relevant industry news and events. Understand what industry news is interesting to your audience. Some news merits an immediate, personal campaign vs. waiting to include it in a newsletter.

•    Blog to your content strategy - Blog about relevant news and topics that map to your content strategy. Most companies should be posting a minimum of 1-2 times per week (and, as you grow, even more). The trap companies often fall into with blogging is that they think every post has to be a deep thought leadership piece. If you have this attitude, your blog will die on the vine. Creating this content regularly with variety is too difficult. Blog about anything and everything that may be interesting to your audience. Blog about a new government regulation. Blog about the tradeshow you are attending. Blog about a customer problem that you discussed in a sales call (no names have to be mentioned). All of these things are interesting to your audience and they can learn from them.

•    Promote your content with social media - Use social media to connect in a variety of ways to your prospect list. Use Twitter to promote new blog postings and publish your corporate twitter accounts on your site, in your email and business cards. Create and use LinkedIn groups and have your employees update their status to reflect interesting posts. Whatever social media you are investing in should promote your content.

•    Your newsletter is your magazine – Highlight your top tracking blogs from the month and send a custom newsletter to each contact group. Make sure the content is relevant to them and coordinate any calls to action in the email appropriately. If you have blogged regularly, then your newsletter content is already written – meaning the hardest part of the job is already done.

•    Use marketing automation tools for distribution, lead scoring and follow up – Using marketing automation tools is an absolute must to get the most out of your lead nurturing programs. There are a number of tools that meet a wide variety of budgets and have a range of features. The key is that whether you use Eloqua, Loopfuse or another tool, you need to have the capability to easily manage your contact lists, publish regular targeted content to those contacts, and score and follow up with them appropriately based on their subsequent actions.

Too many companies have valid contact lists that go untapped. Today’s sales process takes time and relationship building. Thinking like an editor and delivering interesting, relevant content to your audience will establish a connection with them, create thought leadership and keep you at the top of mind when it comes to solving the problems you address and they are ready to buy.

I know that this will sound like a random post topic for startup advice but I promise it’s relevant.  You actually need to give advice to nearly every employee whom you offer a job to on how to best quit their job.  This is important to improve conversion rates of accepted offers / joiners, shorten the time-to-join ratio and the improve the ability of that employee to maintain good relations with their former employer.

When I started blogging I had an idea.  I would take all of the one-on-one conversations that I have with entrepreneurs from the things I’ve learned and just write them up for anybody to read.  This is advice that I end up giving ALL THE TIME and every CEO of a company I’m involved with will have heard this from me. (also, please remember my disclaimer – I’m not a lawyer)

You just made an offer to a new employee to join your company.  It might be a VP of Sales, Marketing or Technology.  Or it may just be a junior programmer, sales rep or accountant.  The reality is the same.  In a startup you want them to join immediately.  Tomorrow if possible.

Yet they of course need to serve notice.  There is always some version of the following scenario: - they’ve worked at their employer for 3-4 years - they really like their boss - they don’t want to leave on bad terms - their boss asks them to just work 4-6 weeks so he / she isn’t left in a bad position - better yet, they’ve said,  ”help me understand what we could improve so you’d be happier staying”

Should you just let them deal with this themselves? No, of course not!  You’re an entrepreneur – you’re allowed to be a bit of a control freak.  I leave nothing to chance.  Left to their own devices most employees will muck up their exit.  Why?  They quit jobs very seldom (hopefully, otherwise, please reconsider whether you really want to hire them.  Job hoppers NEVER make good employees.  Kind of obvious even though many people overlook this).  Yet if your company is growing you deal with people quitting their employers to join you all the time.  So you have more experience in helping to manage the process.

I operate on the principle that you’re most vulnerable in any deal immediately after you’ve won.  I believe the same is true in recruiting.  So your goal is to get the employee working in your company as quickly as possible and with the least amount of collateral damage.

How do you deal with the time pressure issues? Sales people are normally tossed out the door when they quit their jobs.  So that one is usually easiest.  But for all other roles it can be tough.  Employees who are about to join you get “guilted” into sticking around longer than is necessary.  My argument to the incoming employee was always, “look, BigCo is never really going to miss you materially once you’re gone – it just feels like that.  They’re going to pressure you into staying longer than you should. Don’t.  Trust me, if they were doing layoffs they wouldn’t keep you an extra month just to be nice.  They key is to be very professional and courteous on the way out.  Then you’ll be fine.  And we really, really need you in two weeks so please do your best not to get suckered into extra time.”

I had a tactic of writing out the line of reasoning for the employee so they knew what to say. The follow are the employees talking points - I’ve been offered a role in a new startup that is an exciting new opportunity for me. It’s a lot of responsibility and has fantastic upside.  I’m really excited. - So unfortunately I’m going to turn in my notice - They’re pressuring me to start next week (this is called “anchoring” (setting short time frames)) but I obviously told them that it would be unfair to give you less than 2 weeks’ notice. So I just want to confirm with you that you want me to stay the full two weeks ( a “presumptive close” (which makes it sound like, “of course this is the normal sequence of events. I’m just confirming what I’m sure you’ll agree.))

Employer: “Gosh, this is a really crucial time. I really need you to stay for 4-6 weeks if we’re to hit our deadlines.” (invariably this is always their position).

- I understand why you’d feel that way and I’d love to help. But it’s super important to me that I don’t lose this opportunity and I’m 100% sure I’m going to eventually join. So I’d really like to work with you to minimize any pain for you. I can take those two weeks (again, anchoring and presumtive close) and really do a thorough transition to anybody you’d like. I’m happy to put in evenings and weekends to make this transition smooth. Please let me know how to best help. I know that my new company is being unfair in asking for a week so I’ve pushed for a full two weeks.

Me to future employee, “I know that they’re going to put the pressure on. You need to be resolute. Professional, polite, helpful and hard-working. But resolute. They’re going to try and get you to work longer. They might even try to convince you to stay. In reality they’ll get over your leaving. But we REALLY need you now.”

Why am I such a control freak about this? Noting good has ever come out of a potential employee staying longer at their previous company.  It’s more time that they can be flipped into staying.  They’re always guilted into staying longer than they should.  In this scenario – I lose.  Thus, I try to leave nothing to chance.

How should they talk to their boss about why they’re leaving?  The most common mistakes people make is telling their employer why they were unhappy.  This accomplishes nothing.

Only two outcomes – 1) they’re bitter about the things you told them needed to improve.  Let’s face it – they’ll never improve.  And they’ll invent that history that you were the bad guy for complaining.  Seem it happen – I promise.  No matter how hard they push in the exit interview don’t offer up the dirt.

2) They use what you’re unhappy about as a means to convince you to stay.  ”Oh, you didn’t have enough leadership opportunities?  We’ll put you in charge of this 10-person tech department.  I always remind employees, “if they really cared about your progression they would have done that proactively.  If they’re doing it now it’s only because they feel they have a gun to their head.  If you weren’t happy before this superficial change is only window dressing. They’re just rolling out the red carpet for you when you’re on the way out the door. If they were like this before what are they going to be like for the next few years of your job.

So my script for employees is to say, “I’m leaving for personal reasons.  I loved my time at YourCo.  I learned so much.  I grew.  I build fantastic friends and I’ll always be part of the alumni club.  But it was just time for me to move on to another opportunity.  It wasn’t YourCo.  It was me.  I was ready for the change.”  My main message is to:

- say you’re leaving for “personal reasons” and no matter how hard you’re pressed don’t give in and expound.  It’s just personal reasons.  Nobody can argue with this.  Nobody can offer you a better role to improve “personal reasons”- when asked what this really means just avoid answering.  ”You know, I was really happy here.  I just have some personal reasons why it’s time for a change.  NewCo seems like a great opportunity for me.”

Summary Recruiting is a very time-consuming and expensive exercise.  Most people put in herculean efforts into the process until the time of the offer being accepted.  And then they leave the rest to fate.  You enter a risky period after they’ve accepted.  You need to get them in your doors as quickly as possible.  There’s nothing worse than losing an employee that said yes but never joined.

One last hack For executive-level hires I like to get a press release written and work with the incoming employee on the wording and importantly timing of the release.  I like to discuss with them a timeline for announcement for 2 reasons: 1) it starts to build in emotional commitment and 2) you get a chance to test their resolve to joining.  You can always tell the person that is not persuaded when they’re not engaged in the press release process.  If they’re not engaged you can: 1) spend more effort making sure they’re bought in or 2) keep more back-up candidates warm.

Mark Suster is a former entrepreneur and currently a partner at GRP Partners. This post was originally published on Mark's blog, Both Sides of the Table. It is republished here with permission.

Editor’s note: In the following guest post, Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne reveals some of the secrets of using video to help boost the search results rankings of your website. Fliqz is an online video platform.

As most search engine optimization (SEO) experts are aware, getting a first-page Google result is harder than ever. Not only do Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in complexity, but Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to “blended” search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down—and sometimes off the page—traditional web results that would have otherwise competed for top rankings.

But where problems arise, so do opportunities. Although Google’s newfound enthusiasm for video has created more competition for fewer traditional search results, it has enabled sites with video assets—even sites that would otherwise score poorly in the Google index—to successfully achieve first-page rankings. In fact, Forrester Research found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.

Here’s what a blended search result looks like for the search query “777 built in 4 minutes“:

Those images at the top of the search results are video thumbnails, and today, there’s only two ways to get there:

1. Upload your video to YouTube.

The advantage of this is that you are 100% certain to be indexed into Google’s search engine. This does not guarantee you’ll get a first-page result, but at least it ensures that Google knows your content exists.

The drawback, of course, is that anyone who clicks on a YouTube result will be taken to YouTube, which may be fine if your goal is branding (i.e., you only care that people watch your video). If your goal is driving traffic, as is typically the case with SEO, this won’t be a successful strategy.

Your other alternative is:

2. Video SEO

Video SEO is a set of techniques designed to make sure that:

• Google finds your video content
• Google successfully indexes your video content
• Google will display your video content when specific keywords are entered as search terms

Here’s how to make it work:

You Need Video Content

Google is fairly flexible in what it considers to be video content. You can use actual video footage, but screen captures, slide shows, animated PowerPoint slides, and other content will work just as well. Google can’t actually “see” what’s inside the video content, so it relies on title and other meta-data to determine what content your video actually contains.

Submission, Not Discovery

With traditional web pages, Google utilizes crawlers to discover and index web content. Unfortunately, Google can’t read Flash very well (although it is trying), and as a result, most video content is invisible to Google’s search crawlers. Therefore, the best way to appear in Google’s blended search results is to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap. This is similar to an XML sitemap, but is formatted specifically for video, and only contains information about your video content. It is submitted using Google’s Webmaster Tools.

The most common error in Video SEO is to assume that because you have submitted the web page on which a video resides, that the video content itself is being indexed.

You’ll also need to make sure that you have a robots.txt file on all video pages, to ensure that Google can easily verify that the locations on the Web you’ve submitted do in fact exist, and that they contain embed codes which indicate the presence of a video.

Title and Title Tags

When ranking videos, Google primarily considers the match between search keywords and the video title. Although Google allows you to submit other meta-data such as description and keywords, these currently don’t have much influence on your search ranking. Google likes it when the title tag of the page matches the title of the video, and will give a higher weighting for results where this is the case.

Video SEO is Long Tail

Like traditional SEO, you’re much more likely to see results with Video SEO if you target more specific, or longer tail, search terms. A video titled “Dog” is unlikely to produce a first-page ranking, while a video titled “German Shepherd Police Dog” will be more likely to score well in Google’s algorithm. Since Google can’t determine the actual content of the video, you might consider submitting the same video multiple times with different titles that match potential search terms.

New and Small Don’t Matter

With traditional SEO, the age of a website is an important consideration for Google in deciding its ranking. Google also considers things like the number of pages on the site, and the number of links to the site, along with the importance of the places those links originate.

In Video SEO, none of this matters. This means that even new sites and small sites can compete on equal footing with larger and more established players. Publishers who are too small or too new to even consider traditional SEO can still be taking advantage of Video SEO opportunities.

For the Foreseeable Future, Video SEO is a Winning Strategy

As time goes by, Google’s discovery and indexing of video content will no doubt become more sophisticated, and as competition for video results increases, it will become harder for sites to achieve these first-page rankings. However, the number of web pages still massively outnumbers indexed video assets, and for as long as that continues, publishers will have an opportunity to jump to the top of Google’s search results through Video SEO.

Posted by Raj Dash

While companies are starting to adopt Social Media for online marketing campaigns, and even letting employees participate, the question of ROI (Return on Investment) arises, along with doubts about what metrics to measure. How do you know how effective your social media campaigns are if you’re not measuring any metrics, let alone an overall ROI? Below, we discuss ten important Social Metrics for companies.
 
According to 2009 Mzinga & Babson Executive Education study, over 80% of professionals do not measure ROI for their company’s social media programs. Granted, Social Metrics and their measurement techniques are relatively new, and this might account for the lag in tracking. However, there are some organizations measuring social metrics, which enables them to eventually measure ROI. Marketing Sherpa’s survey of 2,000+ marketers shows the following three social metrics at the top of what’s being measured:

1. Visitors and sources of traffic
2. Network size (followers, fans, members)
3. Quantity of commentary about brand or product

These are easily understandable common social metrics. However, with some C-level executives saying that they want to measure ROI from social media but don’t yet know the value of certain types of social media, there has to be more measurement and analysis. Monitoring data is only valuable if metrics relevant to a company are being tracked, analyzed, then applied to improving a Social Media Marketing (SMM) strategy. Each company may have some specific requirements, but here are ten important social media metrics to measure:

1. Social media leads. Track web traffic breakdowns from all social media sources, and chart the top few sources over time. If members of your social media networks are sending referrals, consider measuring this data as well.
2. Engagement duration. For some companies, engagement duration is more important than page views. For example, if you have a Facebook application, how much time are social network members spending using it? Is per-member usage increasing over time? Alternately, if people visit your your company websites from SM (Social Media) sites, how long are they spending? (Also consider tracking which pages they visit.)
3. Bounce rate. Are visitors coming to your site from SM sites but quickly leaving? Maybe your landing page needs better, more relevant copy. Maybe the information they’re seeking isn’t easily found.
4. Membership increase and active network size. This is the portion of your company’s social networks (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) that actively engages with your social media content (e.g., Twitter, Facebook Pages, etc.) Is your collective members, followers, fans network growing, and is there interaction with your content?
5. Activity ratio. How active is your company’s collective social network? Compare the ratio of active members vs total members, and chart this over time. There’ll always be some social network members who are inactive, but if you initiate a campaign to increase interaction, you should also measure the resulting data. Activity can be measured in a variety of ways, including usage of social applications.
6. Conversions. You want social network members to convert: into subscriptions, sales (direct or through affiliates), Facebook application use, or whatever other offerings you have in your overall sales funnel and that can somehow be directly or indirectly monetized. (E.g., subscription to a weekly e-newsletter can be monetized by giving other companies access to your list in the form of advertising.) Measure all types of conversions and chart them over time.
7. Brand mentions in social media. So, you have a highly active social network and members are talking about your company or the company’s brands. Measure and track both positive and negative mentions, and their quantities.
8. Loyalty. Are social members interacting in the network repeatedly, sharing content and links, mentioning your brands, evangelizing? How many members reshare? How often do they reshare?
9. Virality. Social members might be sharing Twitter tweets and Facebook updates relevant to your company, but is this info being reshared by their networks? How soon afterwards are they resharing? How many FoaFs (Friends of Friends) are resharing your links and content?
10. Blog interaction. This is actually more than one metric lumped together. Blogs ARE part of an SMM (Social Media Marketing) toolkit, but only if you allow comments and interact with readers by responding. If you’re doing this, encourage responses either directly in the comments section of blog posts, or via Twitter. (Use a blog widget that allows this.) If your blog’s content is suitable for social voting (Digg, Propeller, Mixx, etc.) or social bookmarking (Delicious, Stumbleupon) sites, install a blog plugin that displays the necessary sharing “buttons”, then track referrals back from those sites.

You can see from the above list that there are both key metrics and variations that you’ll probably want to monitor and analyze, depending on your business objectives. Not all of them are simple metrics to track, and as such do require either or both custom tools and custom reports. Supplement your metrics reports by noting any milestones in your SMM plan. Also, if you run any sort of social campaigns, measure the ROI on specific goals.  Social campaigns could use applications (E.g., Facebook applications like  Mob the Rainbow) to encourage social participation. Measure  application usage and resulting conversions. Finally, the use of complex measurements such as Multiple Moving Averages (MMAs) can show both short- and long-term trends, thus providing you with an overall view of the health of your sites and social networks.

Are there other metrics you measure that you feel are more important for your company? What tools do you use to measure social metrics? Let us know in the comments.

Its no surprise that most angel investors are successful entrepreneurs. You can see that in the list of names belowJeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, to single out a few. But are they as successful in the role of angel investor? Bloomberg BusinessWeek asked researcher YouNoodle to analyze the investment track record of this group of well-known tech personalities whose activity as angels has stayed largely hidden until now.

Click column heading once to reorder from highest to lowest. Click twice to reorder from lowest to highest.

2010 Rank	Investor	Number of Angel Investments	Percent of Companies Operating, Acquired, or Public (not dead)	Number of Employees*	Amount of Funding Received (in Millions)*	Best Financial Performance** (Rank)	Most Influential*** (Rank)	Most Diverse Portfolio**** (Rank)	Investment focus
1	Chris Dixon	23	100	3,283	1,071.8	1	11	1	B2B internet services, Consumer Internet
2	Ron Conway	190	97	29,703	3,407.0	2	1	12	Consumer Internet, Mobile
3	Reid Hoffman	49	96	69,796	2,270.9	4	3	24	Consumer Internet, Social Networking, Gaming
4	Esther Dyson	60	98	5,357	480.5	3	16	25	Consumer Internet, Social Networking, Space Exploration
5	Peter Thiel	26	92	69,499	1,577.4	8	2	9	Consumer Intenet, Mobile, B2B internet services
6	Marc Andreessen	53	100	3,835	1,157.6	6	6	20	Cloud Computing, Virtualization, SaaS, Consumer Software
7	Jeff Bezos	18	100	21,028	482.9	5	12	16	Online Marketplaces, Space Exploration
8	Chris Sacca	31	94	593	296.4	16	9	6	Consumer Internet, B2B Internet Services
9	Mike Maples	39	97	3,377	522.6	13	13	8	Consumer Internet, Mobile, Gaming, Retail
10	Andy Bechtolsheim	49	100	31,184	954.8	12	8	19	B2B Internet services
11	Paul Graham	129	84	606	84.4	7	14	21	Infrastructure, Virtualization, Networking
12	Max Levchin	7	100	491	277.5	21	4	3	Consumer Internet, SaaS
13	Aydin Senkut	65	95	933	316.8	9	21	11	Consumer Internet, B2B Internet Services
14	Bill Joy	24	100	5,275	551.1	20	7	7	Consumer Internet, Mobile, B2B Internet services
15	Kevin Rose	12	100	369	229.4	14	19	10	Networking, Infrastructure
16	Dave Duffield	18	89	2,271	219.9	10	15	22	Consumer Internet
17	Andrea Zurek	26	92	1,767	77.8	15	24	5	Consumer Internet, Search, Software
18	Marc Benioff	9	100	74,891	133.4	17	22	4	SaaS, B2B Internet Services
19	Jeff Clavier	52	92	911	276.2	22	5	17	Consumer Internet, B2B internet services
20	Caterina Fake	6	83	77	35.7	24	20	2	Consumer Internet, E-commerce
21	Martin Varsavsky	28	96	2,078	302.5	23	10	15	Consumer Internet
22	Naval Ravikant	21	90	308	187.3	18	17	18	Consumer Internet, B2B Internet Services
23	Joe Kraus	5	100	680	160.0	11	25	23	Consumer Internet, SaaS
24	Eric Schmidt	9	100	129	97.4	19	18	13	Enterprise Software, Consumer Internet
25	Lauren Flanagan	23	96	257	50.5	25	23	14	Healthcare & Biotechnology

^*Figures are total for all companies in the portfolio.
^**Annual growth of investments, companies operating at valuations above $100 million, and the sale of any companies for over $50 million.
^***Co-investment connections reveal how many angels they have worked with, uniqueness of co-investments, and critical bridges between angel groups.
^****Range of industries and countries in the angel's portfolio.

Data: YouNoodle

Whether they're found in a garage or inside an established enterprise, startups struggle with decisions about process and infrastructure. The speed at which a startup can learn is its competitive advantage and the defining factor in its success. But startups can't rely on the processes and infrastructure that their established competitors use, because those "best practices" tend to kill disruptive innovation.

Still, startups develop some kind of process — whether it's disciplined, haphazard, bureaucratic or empowering — because building a great product depends on it.

They just need to balance process with innovation. Companies that insist on building a world-class infrastructure before shipping a product are doomed to "achieve failure," because they're starved of feedback for too long. I learned this lesson first hand in a previous company (read the sad story here). On the other hand, companies that take a "just do it" attitude without any process at all are also taking a major gamble. High-profile startup Friendster had first-mover advantage in the social networking space, but created openings for competitors when it could not scale to meet demand.

Finding the right balance requires an understanding of the fundamental feedback loop that powers all startups. It begins with an idea, which is translated into a product via the "build stage." When customers interact with that product, they create data, which startups harvest in the "measure stage." And, with any luck, that data will inform the company in the "learn stage," and that learning will influence the next set of ideas. This three-stage feedback loop sounds simple, but it's powerful nonetheless. It gives rise to this heuristic for evaluating any process or infrastructure change in the context of a startup:

Always choose the option that minimizes the total time through the feedback loop.

In other words, any change that accelerates learning is a win, and everything else is waste. This is very different from the trade-offs that need to be made in situations where the goal is to optimize for profit, margin, or growth.

The lean movement has been preaching waste reduction for many years, and anyone familiar with those ideas will understand how it applies here. The only difference here is that instead of measuring the creation of value by our ability to produce tangible high-quality artifacts, startups measure value by validated learning about customers.

This approach clashes with classic product management and product development. The detailed specification documents that PMs demand go stale too quickly to keep up with a fast-learning team. Massive data warehousing reports used in product dev do what warehosues do well, store data. They don't promote learning, because people learn best when presented with a small number of actionable metrics. And engineers who build heavyweight architectures may design a technical triumph, but lack the agility to adapt when the goal of the system changes radically.

Every process a startup uses operates at one stage of the feedback loop. But lean startup practices have the effect of optimizing the total time through the loop. Practices that are harmful are the ones that optimize our ability to do just one of the three stages well. For example, you can build much faster if you don't "waste time" measuring. That's like suggesting you can drive faster if you close your eyes and hit the accelerator. It's true, but dangerous. The same is true for departmental structures that work like silos. They may work in large companies, but in startups they're dangerous because they encourage people to improve at their specialized job rather than maximizing learning.

Using just the right amount of process can help startups accelerate. But, for the entrepreneur starting from scratch, investments in process and infrastructure are expensive, and take time and energy away from work that directly benefits customers. Even worse, process investments can quickly become obsolete as a company grows, and management challenges evolve. Adapting a process to this ever-changing reality requires a commitment to continuous improvement and incremental investment, which will be the subject of the next post in this series.

Eric Ries is the author of StartupLessonsLearned.com and is an adviser to many startups, companies, and venture capital firms.