Contributor

by Alex Goryachev, author of “Fearless Innovation: Going Beyond The Buzzword To Continuously Drive Growth, Improve The Bottom Line, And Enact Change“

Now is the best time to expand technology innovation beyond efficiency and profits, and put it towards common good. The innovation-change cycle can be illustrated by the work of Abraham Maslow. If you’re not familiar with Maslow, he was a twentieth-century American psychologist, best known for developing the concept of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, typically depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels that address our material and immaterial human needs.

At the bottom level, we have our most basic physiological needs, such as food, shelter, and clothing. The next level up is safety, covering aspects like personal safety and financial security. Level three is that of friendship, family, and a sense of connection, known as the love and belonging level. The fourth level is esteem, including self-esteem, status, and the feeling of accomplishment. And the top level is self-actualization, basically a level that’s all about being the best people we can be, focused on a sense of morality, personal development, and creativity.

This pyramid shows that as one set of needs are met, others arise, and they always will until we reach the “self-actualization” zone. And though self-actualization is an excellent concept we should all strive for, it seems that for most people, more material desires will continue to replace any that have been met. (I’ll leave whether or not this is an endless cycle to the psychologists and real therapists.) The point is that, depending on time, place, and circumstances, fulfilling all of these needs presents challenges, especially as we move on up the pyramid.

Maslow’s hierarchy can actually be seen as one of innovation in practice. Innovation solves the issues society faces at each level, meeting demands of our physical safety, human collaboration, and social, cultural, and economic change. It’s a forward-looking mindset and attitude, and it can’t exist on its own, but only in relation to the world around us.

This concept can be illustrated by observing the earth at night. In 2017, NASA scientists released new global maps of the earth after the sun goes down around the world.  Produced almost every decade for the past twenty-five years, these “night light” maps contribute to a better understanding of our world, including changing economic, social, and environmental implications. When looking at the map, the first thing that jumps out is how dark it actually is throughout much of the globe despite a number of bright clusters. The dark areas are mostly spread out in developing countries, many of which have yet to begin experiencing the effects of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

While some of us are living in smart houses, with amenities like connected irrigation systems, and are sending off cotton swabs of DNA to learn about our personal genomics, almost half of the world has yet to get connected to the internet. While we’re playing on our smart phones, swiping left on Tinder or watching YouTube videos, one-third of the world population lacks access to clean water and half of the world population doesn’t have access to basic healthcare.

I don’t make these comparisons to be flip or to embarrass or shame anyone — there’s nothing wrong with taking advantage of the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s opportunities to pursue a variety of experiences. I bring these issues up because I firmly believe that we all have a responsibility to improve the living conditions for people everywhere. Such improvement can only happen through innovation and economic opportunity. Organizations that are leading this change by investing in making the world a better place end up benefiting more than just their shareholders — they benefit everyone.

Alex Goryachev, author of “Fearless Innovation: Going Beyond The Buzzword To Continuously Drive Growth, Improve The Bottom Line, And Enact Change“, is the former managing director of Cisco’s global Co-Innovation Center, where he spearheaded programs and initiatives to accelerate innovation. He is a Silicon Valley veteran who is a sought-after speaker on innovation and is often referred to as the ‘innovation therapist’.

Innovating For Common Good Republished from Source https://www.youngupstarts.com/2023/02/03/innovating-for-common-good/ via https://www.youngupstarts.com/feed/

by JoAnne Gritter, COO, ddm marketing+communications

Who will be visiting your website or downloading your app today? What about in the future? Who in your organization will be responsible for serving online customers, clients, and employees long after your own career has taken you elsewhere?

Investing in your company’s digital infrastructure goes beyond protecting what you know to be vulnerable now ― particularly your organization’s proprietary data, plus the data of your customers and clients. It involves investing in what you can’t predict about tomorrow. Even if you understand your business inside-out, that knowledge only goes so far toward maintaining an online presence.

When budgeting for a possible economic downturn, it’s tempting to cut spending wherever possible. That might include your company’s digital experience. There are many valid reasons why the cost to maintain websites and apps remains high. Where can’t you scrimp and save, even when times are tough? That answer requires a forward-thinking mindset and plenty of digital expertise.

Here are five areas not worth compromising on your website during a recession:

1. Security.

Corporate investments to protect against cyberthreats have risen dramatically in the last five years. Issues of cybersecurity, user privacy, and accessibility are major concerns across every digital platform.

Threat modeling is the necessary, step-by-step process of ensuring the security of any online asset: identifying its function, the potential threats to that function, prioritizing the vulnerabilities, then taking action to resolve every issue. If your organization is collecting and storing information a hacker could use ― contact information, financial data, etc. ― threat modeling can help identify that data and secure the digital infrastructure needed to protect it.

Not every website will require a high degree of security, but any consumer or client data your organization collects can pose a potential security threat. Consider an intranet site containing proprietary pricing information. Most medium- to large-sized companies have an intranet of some kind, often with API integration to CRMs like Salesforce. Those integrations might be tremendously useful, but they make projects more expensive and are a high target for hackers.

2. Maintaining interconnections.

B2B and B2C apps, websites, and intranets are all interconnected now. Maintaining those connections are more important than ever. If one link in the chain is accidentally disconnected, an organization must consider the ramifications.

Look for broken links. Know the necessary security patches. Expect that not everything will work smoothly, and consider having an extra set of eyes ― a third-party risk assessment ― to identify points of vulnerability.

Depending on the degree of interconnectedness among your organization’s digital assets, an eye toward the future can be critical. An especially complicated network is difficult to hand off when there is turnover among the key players in your organization’s IT department. Consider the next IT team, and build a digital interface that will be easy for them to use and update depending on tomorrow’s needs.

3. Content audits.

The customer journey is an essential consideration for any organization. For those tempted to take a “set and forget” approach to building a website or app, consider your customers’ journey and how it might change. Is your content “evergreen” enough to stand the test of time as your business evolves? Does the content solve the problems and answer the common questions shared by your customers? Does the content reflect the current voice of your brand?

Auditing any outward-facing content might not be a pressing need for a website that doesn’t integrate with a CRM system, doesn’t store a relatively large amount of data, or doesn’t rely as much on interconnectedness. Other considerations are universal. Can a color-blind user see what is on the screen when they visit your site or download your app? Would a visually impaired person be able to hear the on-screen content they need? Depending on the function or service of your app, such safeguards for persons with disabilities might be mandated by law.

4. Project management.

Whether in-sourcing or out-sourcing a special project, smooth execution is critical if your budget offers little margin for error. Consider a new product or service being promoted on a website or app that’s designed to live online less than a year. Your organization has a relatively short window to make an impression. Advance planning and troubleshooting will be necessary ― tasks better left to an experienced project manager.

If your organization is small or medium-sized, or for large organizations that lack experience in digital project management, consider outsourcing the project. Choose a vendor that will not balloon the budget, the timeline, or the deliverables. An experienced vendor will be clear when communicating deadlines and budgets, and able to translate technical jargon into plain language for any client.

5. Privacy impact assessments.

In recent years, legislation has been enacted to protect the privacy of anyone visiting a website or an app. California and Europe now require businesses to offer a “do not track” option, which restricts the collection of consumer data on their websites and apps.

The Federal Trade Commission defines a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) as “an analysis of how personally identifiable information is collected, used, shared, and maintained.” In some cases, a PIA is required to ensure conformance with the applicable legal, regulatory, and policy requirements for privacy. Cutting a PIA out of your IT budget risks running afoul of the law.

The amount of labor each PIA requires depends on the amount of data your website and app collects. If you’re merely tracking Google Analytics ― not credit card information, HIPAA information, mailing addresses ― there’s much less risk in tracking what pages users are visiting. When personal information is collected, the laws are more rigorous.

JoAnne Gritter is Chief Operations Officer with ddm marketing + communications, a leading marketing agency for highly complex and highly regulated industries. JoAnne is responsible for overseeing and facilitating collaboration between all major functional areas at ddm, including Finance, Human Resources, IT, Operations, Sales and Marketing.

Managing Your Online Presence During A Recession: Where Not To Scrimp And Save Republished from Source https://www.youngupstarts.com/2023/02/02/managing-your-online-presence-during-a-recession-where-not-to-scrimp-and-save/ via https://www.youngupstarts.com/feed/

by Elizabeth Thede, director of sales at dtSearch

Ever feel like you are in a leaky canoe barely staying afloat atop terabytes of data? Transform that leaky canoe into a state-of-the-art exploration submarine with a search engine.

When you think of a search engine, you probably conjure a scan-the-Internet search engine such as Google. Enterprise search engines are in a different product category from your typical online search engine. With an enterprise search engine like dtSearch® one or more exploration submarines can instantly plumb oceans of data and emerge with treasures from the deep.

An enterprise search engine works its search magic after first indexing the data. While indexing requires a lot of effort, all you have to do is point to the folders, email stores, etc., to index, and the search engine will take it from there. When you review files and emails, you typically retrieve them in their associated applications: Microsoft Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Adobe Acrobat Reader, etc. For efficiency, however, the search engine must bypass the associated applications’ retrieval and go straight to the binary formats of files.

While associated applications optimize their file displays for readability, binary formats can look like a sea of binary codes, making it hard to make out any words at all. To identify the text, the search engine needs to apply the right parsing specification. These specifications can be hundreds of pages long and vary dramatically not only across different file types, but sometimes even within different versions of the same file type. While a file extension can suggest the file type, it is far from definitive, as it is not hard to save a PDF with a .DOCX extension or a Word document with a .PDF extension. For accuracy, the search engine needs to rely on the binary format itself to determine the parsing specification to apply.

After applying the correct parsing specification, the search engine is ready to start indexing. The index is an internal tool the search engine builds recording each unique word and number in the data and also tracks the location of each. Expect the search engine to go quite deep here in its indexing reach. For example:

• Text that blends in with the background color in an associated application view, like aqua blue writing against an aqua blue background, may be nearly impossible to spot in an associated application view but is just regular text to a search engine
• “Hidden” metadata that may take a lot of clicking around in an associated application before you even know that it is there is on par with any other metadata to a search engine
• Indexing covers multi-tiered nested structures down to the innermost level, like an email with a ZIP or RAR attachment with an embedded Word document inside, with the Word document itself containing an Excel spreadsheet.

After indexing, the submarines are free to start their explorations. For shared work environments, there are no limits on the number of instant concurrent search threads (or submarines) that can all dive at once without affecting other search threads. Searching can span all data, or hone in on specific metadata only. Queries can range from simple “all words” or “any words” search requests to highly intricate word and phrase Boolean (and/or/not) along with proximity search formulations.

Search covers not only European languages, but also right-to-left languages like Hebrew and Arabic, and double-byte text like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Fuzzy searching sifts through minor deviations in spelling such as mistypes (or mistypos) in an email. Concept searching finds synonyms of search terms. The search engine can also locate numbers and numeric ranges as well as dates and date ranges across different date formats. The search engine can even flag any credit card numbers that may have wormed their way into data.

A search engine has multiple options for relevancy-ranking, letting you sort and instantly re-sort search results by relevancy or other criteria. After a search, the search engine will dive to the bottom of the ocean to pull out a complete copy of retrieved items that you can then browse in full with highlighted hits. And if your ocean of data has new content flowing in and out, no problem. Instant concurrent searching can continue uninterrupted even while an index updates to reflect data additions, deletions or modifications.

Lost in a sea of data no more!

Elizabeth Thede is director of sales at dtSearch. An attorney by training, Elizabeth has spent many years in the software industry. At home, she grows a lot of plants, and has a poorly behaved but very cute rescue dog. Elizabeth also writes technical articles and is a regular contributor to The Price of Business Nationally Syndicated by USA Business Radio, with current articles on the USA Daily Times and The Daily Blaze. 

Lost In A Sea Of Data? Republished from Source https://www.youngupstarts.com/2023/02/02/lost-in-a-sea-of-data/ via https://www.youngupstarts.com/feed/

by Karl Swanepoel, CEO and founder of Revolancer

The world of venture capital fundraising has seen an interesting year in 2022. The previous year has witnessed high raises. According to Pitchbook, U.S. venture firms raised $150.9 billion across 593 funds throughout the third quarter of 2022.

Although that is an impressive amount, that peak is paralleled by the slow distribution of assets to the startup market. Venture capitalists have not only lessened their number of investments but have also been more selective about the startups they want to cultivate.

The reason why fundraising has been significantly harder last year is that venture capitalists have become more risk-averse. Investors are taking time to deploy their capital. With 2021 raising 333 billion U.S. dollars for funds, 2022 is a period where investments “cool down” as they wait for their initial investments to get traction.

Entrepreneurs still have high hopes for 2023. Since there has been a significant hold on capital last year while still raising funds in the billions, there is a chance that we will be able to see investors loosening that grip to fund more startups in 2023 Q1.

While there is no way to predict the trends of how investors will use their money, there are some key tips on how considerably increase your chances of securing the funding you need even as a new entrepreneur.

1. Make sure your company is solving a problem.

Roots run deep. Investors are no longer swayed if you call your product, “The next big thing”. Problems create a certain demand, and demand gives you an opportunity to create value.

2. Have a solid pitch deck that explains your business with the least detail possible.

An average investor spends about 2-4 mins reading through an entire deck. It needs to be digestible that fast so less is indeed more.

Try to approach your pitch deck using a LEAN model. When making your slides, make sure you’re not shoving too many ideas in one slide otherwise you’ll risk having investors focus on trivial things and not the main idea.

Investors only have 30 minutes – 1 hour in an ordinary call. So, you ideally want to minimise your pitching time and maximize your time for the Q&A conversation. By having investors ask questions, you are able to clear any objections rather than babbling on about your company.

3. Have an ask in your pitch deck.

When you show your pitch, the main question that investors get is, “What now?”. You need to show what you are looking for, and where it will get you. Investors want to fund milestones, not time.

4. Highlight what makes your business impressive.

When creating a narrative, you can put the spotlight on the people or communities you’ll be helping, previous funding, and high-profile advisors guiding your company, revenue, & user growth.

Determine the key metrics or the industry standard. That way, you can position your company as a rising player in the startup ecosystem.

5. Reach out to investors in ways other people are not.

It is not enough to just submit a deck and leave it all to chance. As a founder, you have to actively seek out and build relationships with investors. That includes communicating with them aside from the usual platform such as LinkedIn.

Think of avenues of reaching them others may not think of, and stand out quickly.

6. In pitch calls, ask them questions.

You want to make sure they are the right fit for you too. Asking investors questions gives you a pathway to knowing what they’re particularly looking for.

7. Finally, practice, practice, practice your pitch as much as possible.

You can ask for the insight of other founders or any investors. If they do have feedback or questions, tweak your value proposition accordingly.

If they say no, it doesn’t mean it will always be a no – reach out to them again in the future, and keep them in the loop.

This will likely make a good impression on you as it shows you don’t just give up.

At the same time, if investors say it’s not for them, you can still turn it around by asking politely if they will hop on a call anyway and offer you feedback on your pitch.

You become memorable by taking feedback from them and they’re more likely to introduce you to their network if you decide to ask.

Karl Swanepoel is a tech entrepreneur based in the UK. Because of his passion to improve freelancing work conditions, he became the CEO and founder of Revolancer, a freelance marketplace startup that charges zero commission fees. He was the youngest-ever brand ambassador for Britain’s largest business conference, The Business Show, and is now currently helping fellow founders in their journey to starting their own company.

How To Secure Venture Capital Funding Even If You’re A New Entrepreneur Republished from Source https://www.youngupstarts.com/2023/01/31/how-to-secure-venture-capital-funding-even-if-youre-a-new-entrepreneur/ via https://www.youngupstarts.com/feed/

by Rick Fletcher, Group President of Corpay Payables

You have to spend money to make money. That’s an old adage, and it’s true. But actually making the payments takes up a lot of people’s time. It’s critical to your business operations, but it’s not why you’re in business.

That means there are opportunity costs. You have to spend money on the spending of the money instead of on revenue-generating activities.

There are also mindshare costs. Making vendor payments is a brute force activity. Accounts payable (AP) teams are stuck on a hamster wheel, always having to scramble to get payments out the door and then reconciling them on the back end. They’re dealing with a lot of manual work and multiple partially-automated, partially-integrated systems. They spend a lot of time correcting errors.

It’s all about execution and dealing with all kinds of administrative details along the way. They don’t have the systems and the visibility they need to work more strategically.

But within the next ten years, AP will go from brute force execution to strategic decision making, thanks to new fintech offerings.

We haven’t really seen true fintech offerings for business payments in the market until recently. To make business payments efficiently, you need three things: money, infrastructure, and process. A true fintech brings all three.

Most companies today still make payments through their banks, and there’s no question that they are at the heart and the soul of payments. But banks only help with about one-and-a-half of those three things. They have all kinds of lending products that can help you fund your spending, so they can help with liquidity.

They also have part of the infrastructure. They are chartered by governments to steward money and move money around. They invest significantly in licensing, regulatory compliance, networks to move money and data, and fraud protection.

But there’s one big piece of B2B payment infrastructure that they don’t have: vendor networks. That has meant that it has been up to each individual company to conduct their own enablement campaigns to move vendors to electronic payments. That’s holding companies back.

Fintechs are now building B2B vendor networks at scale. Companies can plug right into them and start paying about 80 percent of their vendors electronically right out of the gate.

Where banks really fall down is in the area of process. Process automation is where technology companies, on the other hand, excel. We’ve seen a lot of ERP, procurement, and invoice automation vendors start to offer payments as an add on. It makes sense because people are already using their software to automate the workflow that leads up to the point of payment. But the software providers do not have the vendor networks or the ability to offer liquidity.

This is why making vendor payments is such a disjointed process. Up until recently, no provider has offered the combination of the “fin” and the “tech” needed to address the process from end to end.

Today’s fintechs deliver technology and services that take costs and inefficiencies out of the process. They give AP teams visibility into the status of approvals and payments. But most importantly, they free up mindshare for them to be able to use payments as a strategic lever.

AP teams can get out of the payments processing game and still have all the visibility and control they need to run the business. They have the insight they need to become a management- and decision-making group. They have time to think, versus just trying to keep things moving.

They can use their knowledge of the inner workings of the company to contribute in any number of areas – cash management, job cost accounting, and cost and process optimization. The efficiency gains, combined with increased rebates from leveraging the B2B vendor network to pay more vendors by card, can turn the back office from a cost center into a revenue generator.

For far too long, companies have had to live with a set of back-office deficiencies that they are well aware of. They recognize the challenges of working with disparate systems. They know there’s too much manual, non-value added work, and that the time intensity on error remediation is significant. They’ve resigned themselves to these deficiencies because it’s been that way for decades, and there hasn’t been a better way.

There is now. It’s been a long time coming, because business payments are complicated. To really solve the problem, you need to be a true fintech with a complete set of assets – the relationships with the banks and the credit card companies, the network, and the technology. You need to have them at scale, because the volume in B2B payments is massive. It’s a new solution that’s been 50 years in the making. It means that vendor payments don’t have to be suboptimal anymore.

Rick Fletcher, Group President of Corpay Payables, has been a senior leader with FLEETCOR for more than 15 years, driving significant organic growth across different stints within Gift, Prepaid, and Comdata Corporate Payments. Prior to his tenure at FLEETCOR, Rick was in strategy roles with Deloitte Consulting and GE Capital.

From Execution To Insight: How Fintech Is Shaping The Future Of Accounts Payable Republished from Source https://www.youngupstarts.com/2023/01/27/from-execution-to-insight-how-fintech-is-shaping-the-future-of-accounts-payable/ via https://www.youngupstarts.com/feed/