HHCIB 019 Pierre-Loic Assayag & When To Raise

How Hard Can It Be?

My guest this week is Pierre-Loic Assayag, the CEO and co-founder of Traackr, the world’s most powerful and effective influencer management platform. Traackr lets marketers scale their influencer marketing programs by focusing on the individual people with the greatest impact on their objectives. Their customers include Coca-Cola, HP, OpenTable, Capital One, Kiehls, Travelocity, SAP and Adidas. Half of the top 50 communications agencies today use Traackr to drive successful social programs and earn more attention by engaging with the right people, an amazing achievement for a company just in the process of raising its first round of institutional capital. A longtime mar-tech veteran, Pierre-Loic has deep expertise in advertising and marketing innovation across the digital space. After starting his career at P&G, Pierre-Loic became Peugeot-Citroen’s first Director of New Media heading up an international portfolio of information technology projects. He went on to join the frontlines of the Internet economy at places including Viant and Optaros, bringing blue chip customers the vision and execution they needed to survive and thrive in a media landscape transformed by the slow, painful death of traditional mass media. In our second segment we’ll talk about a subject near and dear to any entrepreneur’s heart, which is when to raise money. Traackr’s been remarkably capital efficient in the way it’s grown into a global company, and that’s because Pierre-Loic has some strong views on the relative importance of customer revenue and investor capital. He also has a very specific and I think pretty unique way of thinking about when to go raise money, a model based on aligning your interests with that of investors I think could save a lot of us a lot of heartache as we journey down the road. -- How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ?of the Northeast's most accomplished ?entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.?..?? ?People first. How Hard Can It Be is ?also ?sponsored by Actifio?, the world’s leading Enterprise Data-as-a-Service platform. Deliver your data just like your applications and infrastructure... as a service available instantly, anywhere. For hybrid cloud, faster DevOps, and better business resiliency, Actifio is Radically Simple.