Adrenaline Startups and Rapid-Fire Marketing

The whirlwind dance of understanding basic customer needs and delivering simple products


Many companies today can use existing platforms to build and grow their products without having to invest large sums of time or money.  We try to make each such business even nimbler by first attempting to understand our customers’ needs and then quickly delivering simple products that we think meet them.  This iterative process of customer and product development continues until we discover a winning formula.  We call the ongoing dance “rapid-fire marketing,” and the companies that practice it “adrenaline startups.”  

Sunil Bhargava of Tandem Entrepreneurs and the founder/CEOs of two Tandem companies, Sarah Eisner of JuiceBoxJungle and Ray Lau of PlayHaven, will review how they’ve applied this approach to building their own businesses.

FEATURED SPEAKERS

Sunil Bhargava is a co-founder and partner at Tandem Entrepreneurs, which backs nimble startups with financial and human capital (funds and hands-on help).  Sunil spent the first ten years of his career in deep technology, working at Xerox PARC, HP and Oracle.  He then was on the founding team at Webvan and co-founded Business Signatures, where he played a key role in every aspect of the business, including defining, marketing and selling the product until the company’s acquisition by Entrust in 2006.  

 

Sunil holds a B.S.E.E. from Indian Institute of Technology, an M.S.C.S. from Rice University, and an M.S. in Management from Stanford University.

Sarah Eisner is a founder at at JuiceBoxJungle. Sarah loves building brands from the ground up and creating buzz. She spent the first ten years of her career utilizing her tech education in product marketing and marketing strategy at Cisco. After the birth of her two rambunctious sons, she left Cisco for a tech startup and then just a short year later, in 2006, left the tech startup to co-run an innovative baby bottle company, Adiri, with two other local moms. At Adiri she handled all manner of marketing strategy, branding and outreach (where she learned that she LOVES guerrilla Internet marketing) and also ran sales, PR, advertising, and customer service while weighing in on design, manufacturing, distribution and fulfillment.

Sarah has a M.S.I.E./E.M. degree in Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management from Stanford, and a B.A. from the University of California at Santa Barbara. When not at her computer or snuggling with her boys, she can most often be found in the pool or on the soccer field.

 

Ray Lau is a founder and CEO at PlayHaven, which supports thousands of online communities for gamers.  Prior to founding PlayHaven, Ray was an internal strategy consultant at IBM, where he advised senior executives on various business and operations strategy and organizational change issues.

Ray received his B.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University.  While not working on PlayHaven or beating everyone in Starcraft, Ray enjoys traveling to different countries, tasting new wines, and trying various extreme sports.