企业营销自动化企业Radius完成Peter Thiel领投的5000万美元D轮融资
由 Facebook 的第一个实习生 Darian Shirazi 创建的企业营销自动化企业 Radius获得由Peter Thiel 的 Founders Fund 领投的 D 轮 5000 万美元的融资。 截止到这次融资，Radius 已经获得了总共 1.25 亿美元的投资。但他们没有公开透露目前公司的估值，Radius 的一位发言人表示，该公司价值 5 亿美元。
Radius 围绕大数据分析技术为客户展开 B2B 营销自动化服务。Radius 的“智慧云（Intelligence Cloud）” 可以对客户的众多渠道（社交媒体、合作伙伴数据、销售系统数据、政府公开数据等）的数据进行分析。再利用不同的模型为客户制定营销策略。据称Radius跟踪的企业数达到了 3000 万，可实时收集500亿个数据点，通过公开数据和专有数据的结合为企业生成其最终客户会不会最终购买产品的“信心指数”。
Radius 计划将本轮融资继续用于其“智慧云（Intelligence Cloud）”的开发。而长远的目标就是上市，投资机构也用实际行动表明了对它的信心。Radius 去年 10 月刚刚完成了 C 轮 5470 万美元的融资。上一轮的老朋友 AME Cloud Ventures，BlueRun Ventures Formation 8，Glynn Capital Management，Salesforce Ventures，Yuan Capital 等多家机构都参加了 Radius 本轮的融资。
B2B 的营销工具 Radius 活得不错，B2C 的企业营销自动化工具也开始风生水起，前沃尔玛、高朋高管出来做的 B2C 的企业营销自动化工具 BlueShift 也开始受到关注。
过去的企业营销自动化工具主要围绕 B2B 业务展开。做 B2C 的难点在于，B2C 的商品种类比 B2B 领域多得多，B2C 要做营销自动化，要求服务商提供更多个性化的服务。
BlueShift 和 Radius 一样围绕大数据为客户提供营销服务，他们目前定位在电商客户群。动态分割和动态内容相结合，使得用户的身份数据和操作内容可以更加准确的匹配，以满足商家个性化营销的需求。他们通过利用用户的实时操作数据来建立用户档案，而传统的做法是根据历史操作数据建档。
BlueShift 目前获得了 Nexus Venture Partners 领投的 260 万美元的种子轮融资。
Marketing intelligence firm Radius raises another $50 million
Radius, the marketing intelligence software startup founded by Facebook vet Darian Shirazi, has raised another $50 million led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund.
With the latest investment round, the six-year-old San Francisco-based company will have raised $125 million to date, following a $54.7 Series C round that closed last September.
Radius is not disclosing its exact valuation, but a company spokesperson says it's north of $500 million. The company has doubled its valuation with every round raised.
Radius investors include Formation 8, Glynn Capital Management, Jerry Yang's AME Cloud Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, BlueRun Ventures and Yuan Capital. That's in addition to former Morgan Stanley chairman John Mack and actor/entrepreneur Jared Leto, who participated in Radius's previous investment rounds.
Radius pegs itself as data science company for B2B marketers. Its platform revolves around a predictive marketing software suite and its proprietary data science engine, the Radius Intelligence Cloud, which tracks more than 50 billion data points on 30 million businesses.
The platform connects to a company's CRM platform, and then uses public, government and other partner sources of data to analyze and refine a client's marketing strategy, helping them generate lead lists of their ideal prospects, increase sales or scale to a national campaign. Beyond prospect data, Radius also provides social media activity from the likes of Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, Google and Foursquare, all in one centrally configured place.
Radius clients include office supply chain Staples and POS maker Revel Systems. Its most prominent competitors include Infer, Lattice Engines and Six Sense Media.
Radius plans to use the new capital for continued development of its Intelligence Cloud. As for the company's long-term roadmap, a home on Wall Street is certainly in the cards.
In an interview last September, Sharazi said he ultimately sees Radius as a publicly traded company.
"We want to build a public company," Sharazi said. "You need freedom to build something incredible. We built this practice around data science and the appreciation for data science, and in order to do this right and solve the problems of such a large market, we felt like we had to stay independent."
来源：ZDNet
YC旗下创业公司GO1，想要挑战企业传统合规培训
美国企业孵化器Y Combinator 2015年夏季主打公司GO1，一家成立于北美的员工培训企业，旨在用更有效更新潮的方法教育和培训员工。
想必在大公司工作过的人都应该体验过完成年度合规培训的挫败感。通常情况下，所谓的合规培训就是要你连续看几个小时的网络研讨会，会议的内容是教你如何成为公司团队的一员，如避免腐败等等。举个简单的例子，你要浏览每张幻灯片的信息，哪怕幻灯片上的内容非常浅显易懂。
GO1的培训教师团队由来自牛津大学的澳大利亚人组成，GO1运用的一些培训理念是经过育智科技企业（比如Coursera和Udemy）实践认证的。
GO1的创始人Andrew Barnes是一位罗德学者（猎云网注：罗德奖学金是一个世界级的奖学金，有“全球本科生诺贝尔奖”之称的美誉，得奖者被称为“罗德学者”。），是牛津大学的教育技术硕士。“对于很多公司而言，合规培训是特定的。”Barnes在采访中说道，“可是走形式的合规培训简直是在滥用员工的时间，造成员工对公司不满；真正的员工培训应该是让员工变得更有实力。”
GO1可为不同的组织机构定制不同的培训计划，它要么根据市场需求给组织机构增加培训课程，要么根据每个公司自身的材料制定计划；而不是随便放50页PPT就完事了，GO1的培训课程会请成功人士为你演讲，比如邀请一位将军，他会留给你两个有多项选择的问题，问题的内容是关于他所讲的故事对你的工作有何帮助。
公司可以上传任意PPT和网页文件到GO1上，它会自动将你上传的资料转换为超级文本标记语言（HTML）格式，以供员工下载。不管你是用笔记本电脑、平板电脑还是其它移动设备上传，员工都能看见这些文件；而且他们还能边看边做笔记，以备后续参考用。
“员工培训是个非常分散的市场，里面有很多小型提供商；这让人力资源管理者和员工很头疼。”Barnes说道，“我们的目标是就是帮管理者和员工解决这个问题，满足公司的培训和学习需求。”
在很多情况下，员工的合规培训是法律所需。比如，加利福利亚所有超过50名员工的公司根据法律要求，需为员工提供有关性骚扰的培训。Barnes在采访中说：“现在有很多公司根本不按法律办事，要么是因为他们没有意识到违法的后果，要么是因为他们觉得按法律办事有点困难。”
一年前，GO1在澳大利亚建立，从那时起，它一共为15万用户提供了培训计划，服务了近百家企业。
GO1为澳大利亚一家大的银行提供有关急救方面的培训，对银行员工和顾客进行应急急救教育。
GO1计划在参加YC项目期间打开在北美的市场，它对那些只有10名以下员工的公司提供免费的服务，对大公司也只收每用户1美元/每月。
YC-Backed GO1 Wants To Make Compliance Training Suck Less
GO1, an employee training startup out of Y Combinator’s Summer 2015 cohort, is launching in North America to help companies onboard and educate their employees in a more effective fashion.
Anyone who has worked for a large company knows the frustration of completing yearly compliance training. Generally this means watching a couple of hour-long web seminars about being a team player or avoiding corruption, for instance, which require you to click through slides of information that all seems rather obvious.
Founded by an Australian team of educators out of Oxford University, GO1 is applying some of the concepts proven by edtech startups, such as Coursera and Udemy, to employee training.
“For a lot of companies, compliance training is fairly ad-hoc,” says GO1 founder Andrew Barnes, who is a Rhodes scholar finishing up a masters in Education Technology at Oxford. “It’s a really bad use of people’s time and it creates a sense of resentment toward the company, when really, training should be empowering the staff.”
Organizations using GO1 can customize their own white-labelled training portal by either adding courses from GO1’s marketplace or creating their own with company materials. Instead of a generic 50-slide PowerPoint presentation about why listening is important, a GO1 course might feature a TED Talk by an Army general followed by two multiple-choice questions about how his story applies to your job.
Companies can upload any PowerPoint or web document to GO1, which automatically converts it into an HTML format that employees can download. Whether on a laptop, mobile device, or tablet, employees can view the documents and jot down notes that are saved for later reference.
“This is a very fragmented market, there are a lot of small providers and a lot of frustration for HR managers and employees,” says Barnes. “Our goal is to be the solution for both ends of that equation and provide a consistent single interface for all a company’s training and learning needs.”
In many cases, employee compliance training is required by law. All California businesses that employ more than 50 people, for instance, are legally obliged to provide sexual harassment training to their staff, according to Barnes. Currently many companies aren’t abiding by this law, Barnes says, either because they’re not aware of the legal consequences or because it’s too difficult to do so.
GO1 launched in Australia a year ago, and has since provided training for over 150,000 users spread across nearly a hundred companies.
Customers range from the largest ambulance training program in Australia to a major bank that’s using GO1 for both staff and customer education.
GO1 will focus on growing its business in North America for the duration of the YC program. The service is free for companies with under 10 employees, and currently costs $1 per user per month for larger companies.
Source:TC
告别固定的办公区域，初创公司Doist推出远程工作方案
八年多前，当Amir Salihefendic开发Todoist时，并不是想建立一个供员工大范围使用的网络。
Salihefendic在Bosnia长大，他在开发这个任务管理工具的时候还只是在丹麦念书的大学生，主要目的也只是供自己使用。几年后，他决定全心投入在这个工具上，他发现自己需要雇几名员工，而且经济情况不允许他对工作地点挑三拣四。
现在，这家正式名称叫做Doist的公司已经在20多个国家有了40多名员工，遍及白俄罗斯、巴西、加拿大、德国、意大利、日本、葡萄牙、俄罗斯、韩国和西班牙等等，在美国还有五名兼职员工。这个团队为100多万用户提供服务。没有依靠任何风投，公司仅通过订阅内容，从一开始就保持着稳定的盈利能力，每天新增注册用户大约有1万人。
这样的经历让Salihefendic变成了远程工作的传道者。他不是一个人在战斗，开发了WordPress的Automattic以及Buffer多年来都一直在宣扬分布式劳动力的好处，但有趣的是Doist出于自身利益做到了远超过其他公司的程度。它为远程工作者提供工具，并且能将这一过程中学到的东西都充分利用起来。
远离科技城市
Salihefendic正通过Skype从葡萄牙波尔图和我聊天，他和他未来的妻子几年前决定搬到这个城市。Doist有九名员工都在葡萄牙安家，Salihefendic也在一次游玩中爱上了这个国家，所以他们理应在这里建一个办公室。但他们并不需要呀！
Salihefendic说Doist采用分布式劳动力主要是出于必要性。在台湾为社交网络Plurk工作时，他突发奇想地申请了智利的初创公司孵化器，一获得批准他就打包离开了，从2008年起他就不太重视的Todoist重新得到了他的注意。在开发这个应用的第一个移动端版本时，Salihefendic开始远程雇用员工。
Doist的第一名员工来自Salihefendic在孵化器中同事的推荐。为了更好地扩大队伍，Doist采取了“游击战术”，从Hacker News、Github和Reddit之类的论坛上招兵买马，至少在公司发展到足以吸引求职者之前都是这样做的。
“在圣地亚哥并不是我出去转一圈就能雇到厉害的安卓开发者的，”Salihefendic说，“可能是有一些，但是我找不到。”
很快，Salihefendic发现远程工作还有其他好处。不算办公室和管理费用，光是雇用费用和在旧金山这样的科技城市相比就只要二分之一到三分之一，而且还不用担心Facebook和谷歌这样的科技巨头挖自己墙角。
“这不仅仅是开销的问题，还有人才。”Salihefendic说，“如果你去旧金山，你就是在和拥有数百万投资的大公司竞争。”
不过，最大的好处大概就是Doist能按自己的步调发展，一点一点地学着怎样建立一家远程公司。和其他创业者相比，Salihefendic对来自硅谷的投资以及它给公司带来的压力非常谨慎 。
他说：“这种投资会迫使公司非常快速地发展，但却无法真正地去建立一个优秀的团队或去发展企业文化及经历所必要的过程。”
完善及推广远程工具
Doist的发展过程和其他宣扬远程工作的公司相比并没有很大的不同，它也一样在招揽新员工，其中包括一项能看出求职者在独立工作的情况下将如何表现的测试。员工津贴中包括员工的办公场所费用和团队偶尔见面需要的费用。Salihefendic还强调了书面沟通的必要性，并且每过一段时间一定要达成特定的目标。也就是说，雇主必须要完全投入这种远程工作的模式，否则这种工作方式就注定失败。
但在这些年来建立远程公司的过程中，Salihefendic也发现所需的工具并不完备，而随着Doist的发展，它可以制造更好的工具。Todoist本身就已经开始了这方面的尝试，因为公司首先要迎合自己员工的需求。
比如说，遇到支持不同语言的问题时，Doist就因为在中国有一名财务经理而让问题简单了很多，他帮着解决了日期表述的复杂问题。Salihefendic说：“对一般的公司来说，我觉得他们可能不需要为中文日期花费大量的时间来改进、测试，但对我们来说这都是很正常的。”
Salihefendic认为如果一件产品是由世界各地的人制造的，那么它就更有可能和全世界的用户产生共鸣。他说Doist在台湾有一个设计师，提供的观点就和欧洲的设计师很不一样。他补充说：“现在这个时代，我们制造的产品必须面向整个世界而不只是富有的白种人。”
除了待办清单软件，Doist受自己的分布式劳动力的经验影响，正在研发全新的产品。Salihefendic认为它有点像Slack，公司已经在用Slack了，不过新软件更注重线程通讯。
“我们正在研发这个通讯软件，我们内部也在使用它，并对它进行优化，让它更符合我们的结构。”Salihefendic说，“在Todoist身上也是一样的，我们优化我们的产品使它们符合我们的要求，很可能最终它们也能满足其他远程公司的要求。”
虽然远程工作有一些成功的例子，但规模都比较小。并没有足够的事实能证明大型公司也能采用远程工作。但Salihefendic想试一试。
“我不觉得扩大到几千人的规模是不可能的。”Salihefendic说，“我们想做的事之一就是制造出支持远程工作的工具。你会看到我们在这些工具上的许多创新，它们能帮我们沟通、分享以及在一个庞大的团队中安排活动。”
WITH 40 PEOPLE IN 20+ COUNTRIES, THIS STARTUP WANTS TO MAKE PHYSICAL OFFICES IRRELEVANT
A network of far-flung employees wasn't what Amir Salihefendic had in mind when he created Todoist more than eight years ago.
Salihefendic, who fled Bosnia when he was six years old, was just a college student in Denmark when he designed the to-do list manager, primarily for his own use. When he decided to work on it full-time a few years later, he realized he needed employees, and couldn't afford to be picky about their locale.
Todoist creator, Amir Salihefendic
Today, Doist—that's the official company name—employs more than 40 people in more than 20 countries: Belarus, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Russia, South Korea, Spain, and elsewhere—including five who work in the U.S. at least part of the time. This team serves more than one million active Todoist users. Through optional subscriptions, it has remained profitable from the beginning without any venture capital, and is adding roughly 10,000 new registered users every day.
The experience has turned Salihefendic into something of a remote-work evangelist. He's hardly alone—companies like WordPress creator Automattic and Buffer have been preaching the benefits of distributed workforces for years—but what's interesting about Doist is the extent to which it's powered by its own self interests. It's a distributed workforce making tools for remote workers, drawing on everything it learns in the process.
WORKING OUTSIDE THE BUBBLE
Salihefendic is talking to me via Skype from an office space in Porto, Portugal, where he and his wife-to-be decided to move a couple years ago. Nine of Doist's employees list Portugal as home—Salihefendic fell in love with the country during a visit—so having an office makes sense. But no one is required to be on the premises.
TO BUILD ITS WORKFORCE, DOIST USED "GUERRILLA TACTICS."Doist's distributed workforce arose largely out of necessity, Salihefendic says. He'd been working from Taiwan on the social network Plurk, when on a whim he applied for a grant from a startup accelerator in Chile. He packed up and moved upon acceptance, and Todoist, which had been on the backburner since 2008, became his focus once again. Salihefendic started hiring remotely while building the app's first mobile versions.
Doist's first employees were recommendations from Salihefendic's accelerator colleagues. To build the workforce further, Doist used "guerrilla tactics," he says, recruiting through forums like Hacker News, Github, and Reddit—at least until the company was large enough to attract applicants directly.
"It's not like I can go out and hire great Android developers in Santiago," Salihefendic says. "There were probably some, but I could not find them."
Salihefendic quickly figured out that a remote workforce had other virtues. He estimates that his employee costs are a half to a third what they would be in a tech hub such as San Francisco—not counting savings on office space and other overheads—and he doesn't have to worry about tech giants like Facebook and Google stealing his best employees.
"It's not only about expenses, it's also about talent," Salihefendic says. "If you go to San Francisco, you're competing against companies that have a lot of millions in investment."
Perhaps the greatest benefit, however, is that Doist was able to grow on its own schedule, learning how to build a remote company as it went along. By comparison, Salihefendic seems wary of Silicon Valley funding, and the pressure it puts on companies to rapidly staff up.
"This kind of thing forces you to grow really fast without having time to really build a team, build a culture, build a process," he says.
FASHIONING THE TOOLS
Much of Doist's process doesn't sound drastically different from what's being preached by other remote-work evangelists. The company's screening for new hires, for instance, involves a test project to see how well the candidate works independently. Employee perks include an offer to pay for co-working space and the occasional team meet-up. Salihefendic also stresses the need for written communication and an emphasis on achieving specific goals over time. In other words, employers must go all-in with a remote-work mindset, otherwise they'll fail.
But in building a remote company over many years, Salihefendic has also started thinking that the tools are incomplete, and that Doist can build better ones as it grows. Todoist itself has already been part of that process, as the company adapts it to the needs of its own employees.
SALIHEFENDIC BELIEVES A PRODUCT STANDS A BETTER CHANCE OF RESONATING WITH A GLOBAL WORKFORCE WHEN IT'S CREATED BY PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD.When it came to supporting different languages, for instance, Doist's job was made easier by having a financial manager in China, who helped deal with the complexities of date parsing. "For a normal company, I don't think you would focus on implementing Chinese date parsing, and spending a ton of time on improving and using and testing it, but for us it's just natural," Salihefendic says.
More broadly, Salihefendic believes a product stands a better chance of resonating with a global workforce when it's created by people around the world. He points out that Doist has a designer in Taiwan, who provides a different perspective on design than someone in Europe. "In the current world, the product that we need to build has to target the whole world, and not only white rich people," he says.
Beyond just its to-do list product, Doist is working on something completely new, borne from its own experience as a distributed workforce. Salihefendic describes it as somewhat similar to Slack—which the company already uses—but with an emphasis on threaded communications. It's in early alpha, but the plan is to eventually release it publicly. Not unlike Todoist in its dorm room days, it could be another self-serving tool that ends up being useful to millions.
"We are doing this communication app, and we are using it inside our team, and we can evolve it and fit it to our structure," Salihefendic says. "And the same thing with Todoist: We can develop stuff that solves our needs, and maybe in the end will solve the needs of other remote companies as well."
While remote work has plenty of success stories, most of them have head counts in the dozens, not hundreds or thousands. There's not a lot of proof that a massive organization can have a fully distributed workforce. Salihefendic wants to try.
"I can't really see why you should not be able to scale to thousands of people," Salihefendic says. "One of the things we want to do as a company is create tools that enable remote work. You will see a lot of innovation in the tools that we have access to that enable us to communicate, share thoughts, and organize thoughts inside huge remote organizations."
Source:Fastcompany
硅谷
硅谷
硅谷
硅谷
硅谷
硅谷
硅谷
硅谷
硅谷
扫一扫 加微信
hrtechchina
