Specifically hpshopping.com, I was lucky enough to have been a part of HP at an evolutionary time in their internet strategy. 2006 through 2007 put me in a position to run search marketing with extensive budgets, introduce SEO concepts throughout the organization, and experience the corporate backlash to future of social marketing.
What better time to have been so heavily involved in search? Working with the exceptional (pre-Google acquisition) team at Performics, we were doing back hand springs over traditional methods for measuring offline marketing; using search to evaluate the impact of TV, print, and radio by way of search stream analysis and indirect conversion. At the time, I was largely responsible for search marketing, comparison shopping (where I became good friends with the scholarly, eCommerce guru Brian Smith), affiliate marketing, and display advertising on behalf of HP’s direct to consumer online channel. A wonderful transition from my insider experience at Yahoo!, HP honed my strategic and tactical perspectives to search and led to a role in the innovation of local search.
Oh that backlash to social marketing? I was run through some HR interviews out of concern for this very blog and the potential it held for an employee to speak on behalf of HP. Boy have times changed!
Hands down, the smartest Online Marketer I have ever met. He combines his creative thinking, analytical skills, and attention to detail to create highly effective customer acquisition strategies for HP.
– Michael Brito; Head of Social Strategy, WCG
Related Questions
The personality traits that define an entrepreneur (risk tolerance, creative disruption, compulsion to act) cannot be taught. Business can be taught. Marketing, finance, and operations can be taught. But the intrinsic drive that makes someone entrepreneurial is closer to personality wiring than skill development. Universities offering degrees in entrepreneurship are largely teaching business with a startup aesthetic, which has value, but calling it entrepreneurship education is misleading.
Incubators and accelerators have a serious, operationally complex job: give founders access to global mentor networks, connect them to investors, manage deal rooms, deliver curriculum, and track relationships over time. Most do it with a stitched-together combination of video tools, Slack groups, shared Google Drive folders, and spreadsheets of mentor contacts nobody updates. The program director becomes a part-time IT administrator. What an SDO actually needs is civic infrastructure; purpose-built and comprehensive enough to deliver on what it promises founders. Ironically, an incubator's job is to teach founders to stop building things they don't need to build, and then those same incubators do exactly that with their own operations
Building it themselves. The moment a founding team starts building payment processing, identity verification, communications, or payroll logic from scratch, they've made a strategic error. These are domains where the regulatory complexity, machine learning depth, and partnership requirements are severe enough that specialized companies exist for exactly this reason. The cost of getting it wrong, in fines, fraud losses, and engineering time, is catastrophic. The cost of using the infrastructure layer is a fraction of that.
A significant but largely unrealized one. Universities sit on IP, talent pipelines, and federally funded research that could anchor new companies. The problem is most institutions license rather than launch. Real commercialization requires a fundamentally different model than traditional tech transfer.
Because it convinces people who aren't entrepreneurial to pursue paths they aren't suited for, without the resources, experience, or intrinsic drive to succeed. The high failure rate associated with entrepreneurial ventures becomes an economic drain when people who want the image of a founder (the recognition, the status) pour capital and time into ventures that were predictably doomed. Glamorizing entrepreneurship as universally great ignores the distinction between the personality type and the career aspiration.
