Umbrex is pleased to welcome Nadav Shem Tov with NST Success Consulting.  Nadav has founded NST Success Consulting to help companies unlock growth through Customer Success. Nadav brings more than 15 years of professional experience. Starting his career in the elite Israeli intelligence unit 8200 and the Israeli startup ecosystem gave him a head start with leadership experiences in industry-defining and technologically innovative organizations. He has spent the last 9 years consulting tech executives on Customer Success, Customer Experience, and…

In this article, Joydip Gupta identifies the one thing that consistently separates winners from losers in consumer startups. Most of you know the usual must-have’s in a startup business plan. Market must be big, product should solve a real pain point, scalable idea, strong leadership team, solid execution, and so on. No, these are not the capabilities I am referring to. These are hygiene factors. Don’t start a business unless you have these in place. But 95 out of 100…

Claire de Weerdt shares an article that could help grow both your market and, consequently, your business in 2023. The size of the market a business is operating in is something strategy teams, investors, and start-ups all find value in assessing. For strategy teams and executives, understanding market size can enable better strategic decisions and for investors it can help identify if a target is attractive or not. For start-ups, showing a significant and growing TAM can be a critical…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Philippe Simon with WINNOTEK Sarl. Philippe served two years as delegate administrator on behalf of his client in a patent licensing pool addressing a European digital TV standard whereby the client owned an “essential” patent. He assists several public research organizations in technology transfers toward private industry, and facilitates maturation of startups innovative technologies through setup of collaborative projects with industrial partners. Philippe was previously General Manager Business Development, Europe, for Thomson (Technicolor)’s Intellectual Property…

Clemens Buss shares advice on mergers and acquisitions. For the past 25 years, I have provided investment banking type services to a large number of established corporations, startups, venture capital and private equity firms, and other entities. During the first 15 years of my career I worked for Tier 1 investment banks, for the last 10 years I have worked through my own firm, Chateau Partners. Most of the M&A transactions I work on now are in the $50m —…

Priyanka Ghosh shares a case study on helping a startup CEO on the path to growth. A founder faces a unique set of challenges as he transitions from selling a prototype to a few innovative clients to selling a standardized product to the mass market. The expectations on product quality, service responsiveness, compliance, supply chain and sales all increase by a quantum leap. Managing the exponential increase in complexity is something that would challenge the most experienced managers. It is…

In this article, Joydip Gupta identifies the one thing that separates winners from losers in the startup arena.  Most of you know the usual must-have’s in a startup business plan. Market must be big, product should solve a real pain point, scalable idea, strong leadership team, solid execution, and so on. No, these are not the capabilities I am referring to. These are hygiene factors. Don’t start a business unless you have these in place. But 95 out of 100…

Astrid Malval-Beharry shares a case study on building a disruptive smart home solution for an InsurTech startup.  Situation An InsurTech startup approached StratMaven for assistance with a monetization strategy for their smart-home solution. The company wanted to understand whether insurance carriers were interested in subsidizing the cost of the solution, as part of their overall objectives of improving the policyholder experience, preventing claims, and reducing overall costs.   Analysis StratMaven conducted in-depth interviews with carriers and surveyed policyholders to test the…

In this evergreen post from Johannes Hoech, he shares nine tips for startups to get traction with analysts. Once technology startups close their first few enterprise deals and increase revenue to millions of dollars, they often want the analyst community to recognize their innovations and give them their rightful standing in the marketplace. However, few companies know how to engage analysts effectively, are unclear on whether they should even strive to gain analyst recognition, and if they do participate, are…

  Joy Fairbanks provides an article that offers guidance for founders and investors evaluating market opportunities. There are three tiers of scale commonly used to calculate the market opportunity for a startup’s product or service offering:  TAM, SAM, and SOM.  These are acronyms for Total Addressable Market, Serviceable Available Market, and Serviceable Obtainable Market.  The purpose of these market assessments is to determine not what is, but what could be.  Founders, you may be struggling with calculating and interpreting these…

  Nicky Shah shares a Q&A post on Saint Aymes, a business startup that has successfully merged the worlds of art and chocolate. She interviews the two sisters behind Saint Aymes – Lois and Michela. Nicky: How old were you when you decided you would try to launch your own business?  Michela: We didn’t really have a “moment”. Our parents had been business owners when we were growing up so it seemed quite natural to want to also run a…

  Rahul Bhargava takes a look at thriving startups and shares the key factors that led to their success.  Recently, one of the startups I am working with, asked to ‘decode’ a post by Michael Stewart he had read about success factors for a startup. This post itself was a further assessment based on the TED talk by Bill Gross, founder of Idealab, given in March, 2015 on the topic. The talk and further assessment by Michael assessed 5 factors…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Janet Bumpas. Janet Bumpas comes from Silicon Valley where she was part of three startups. She loves all aspects of growing an idea through launch and then building it in the marketplace. Usually, she focuses on product, working with customers to understand their needs and translates these into a product. Currently, she lives in the Netherlands where she works both with large companies and entrepreneurs helping them to launch and scale businesses. She has run…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Uma Sethi. Uma was a Founding member and Principal at BCG Digital Ventures, where she led multi-disciplinary teams to innovate and launch new startups, digital products or experiences. Prior to that, she was at McKinsey for nearly 10 years. She served as the America’s Retail Practice Manager for 4 years and the remainder as a classic strategy consultant. Uma was also a Founding Member of globalgiving.com. Uma currently lives in Redondo Beach, California with her…

  Diane Mulcahy provides valuable questions to help discern the compatibility of an investor before accepting funds for your next project.  In the race to get the check in hand, most entrepreneurs don’t do in-depth due diligence — or any due diligence — on the venture capital (VC) firms they pitch. Founding teams eager to raise capital to grow their companies enter into long-term partnerships with VC firms they don’t know well. It’s a risky strategy that can leave startup…

  Christy Johnson shares valuable insights from a survey of Seattle start-ups. Most Seattle startups are very focused on the data—they rely heavily on data to drive product decisions. Seattle is home to Amazon and Microsoft, which have leveraged data to succeed in everything from retail, to cloud computing, software development and artificial intelligence. But it’s also home to non-technology companies like Starbucks, that are operating like technology companies and utilizing data to make their core business decisions. Visionary technology…