RAW FILE
2016 USBLN
19th ANNUAL NATIONAL CONFERENCE
ORLANDO, FLORIDA
SEPTEMBER 21, 2016
USBLN PITCH COMPETITION
3:15 P.M. ET
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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) or captioning are provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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Good afternoon. Could I have everybody's attention, please? Are you ready? Good afternoon. Could I have everybody's attention, please? I know everybody's excited to see one another. We need to get started, though. I'd like to welcome everybody to the 2016 USBLN DOBE Pitch Tank Competition. Will your pitch survive?
(Cheering and applause)
I'd like to introduce Regina Heyward, Senior VP and Head of Supplier Diversity with Wells Fargo, also our 2016 Supply Chain Track Chair.
(Cheering and applause)
> REGINA HEYWARD:Good afternoon!
> AUDIENCE:Good afternoon!
> REGINA HEYWARD:You've got to do better than that. We're going into the tank right now. Welcome to the place to be in the 2016 USBLN Conference. This is the supply chain track, and we are about to head into pitch tank. But before we do that, I want to thank every person in this room for bringing this idea into reality. The reason why we're focused on pitch tank is because we believe it's important for our DOBEs to have a concentration in technology, innovation, and to really be able to bring the products and services to the marketplace and to our collective corporate organizations that will help this country and our society to grow.
We've heard all the great data about how millennials with disabilities expect to be employed, how one in five households has a person with a disability, and one in five people, 20%, also have a disability. So this is about putting on our collective creativity, thinking caps, innovative spirits, and figuring out how we solve the problems that will allow our companies and our community to continue to succeed. And we've brought an expert in to help us with this.
I'm going to introduce someone who has deemed himself as a serial entrepreneur. He is the definition of serial entrepreneur. I'm going to introduce you to Rodney Sampson, an entrepreneur with four startups, the writer of a book, inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King. Rodney has served in an executive capacity with 13 media, the organization that produces the shows survivor, the Voice, and Shark Tank. He hails from Atlanta, and is an adviser to Leaf. Without further ado, I want to thank you all for being here, and I'm going to hand this over to Rodney Sampson. Let's show him some love as he comes up.
(Cheering and applause)
> RODNEY SAMPSON:All right. How's everyone doing?
> AUDIENCE:Good.
> RODNEY SAMPSON:Very good. Good deal. We're going to have some fun this afternoon, and we're going to keep everything in a timely manner. Let me give you context. Thank you, Regina and the Wells Fargo team for actually creating something that had never been created before. This is actually the first time this type of pitch competition where organizations get to come and pitch a panel of judges, and really an audience as well, to some degree, their startup idea or existing business that they are commercializing to the visionary leadership of the USBLN, Patricia, Cami, Jill, you should give them a hand.
(Cheering and applause)
> RODNEY SAMPSON:I'll give you some quick context of why I may be a little bit qualified to, kind of, go through this.
(Laughter)
> RODNEY SAMPSON:Today. And then as we have time, going through the process, I'm going to give you little nuggets of information that have helped me along the way as well. So I spent the first ten years of my career companybuilding. Regina alluded to it. I built four startups from the ground up, two incredible big failures you never heard of, and two exits. Along that way, I had to master the art of listening. And then pitching. And those startups raised a total of over $20million in angel and venture capital, which in the grand scheme of things is not a lot.
But when you layer on issues related to diversity and inclusion and access to capital, it became somewhat of a task to do that. And now I'm actually on the other side of that. So I'm a partner at TechSquare labs in Atlanta, Georgia. We've raised $25million, we invest in earlystage companies, kind of at the intersection of big data and the internet of things. So all that future stuff that you're hearing about, that's what we do.
So over the last four years, companies that we've invested in and incubated have raised over $250million and created 500 jobs.
(Applause)
> RODNEY SAMPSON:And on the side, the side hustle is on a case by case basis, I advise highgrowth startups on scaling and hopefully getting acquired as well. And for two years I was the first executive in charge of diversity inclusion for the parent company which is now owned by MGM that mark Burnett started, which included Shark Tank. One of the things we were instrumental in doing is making sure more women and minorities got the opportunity to pitch on the show. The last thing I did before exiting was negotiate for Troy Carter.
He used to be lady gaga's manager, African American investor who owns part of uber, Dropbox, Lyft, we negotiated for him to go on the show as a guest judge to put forth another narrative as well in fact and that's what these pitch competitions ultimately do, whether you're pitching for money or pitching for customers, or pitching for strategic relationships, understanding how to listen, how to do your diligence, on your potential customer, because investors ultimately are customers.
They're like husbands and wives. You're married to investors usually for the life of that investment. So you want to do your due diligence on who those investors are at the same time they're going to do their diligence on you as well. But it normally starts with some type of pitch. And so here we are at the USBLN DOBE Pitch.
(Cheering and applause)
> RODNEY SAMPSON:And for all of the folks that are on social media, the hash tag, of course, for this is #DOBEpitch, and, of course USBLN16 as well. Please, let's go viral on this. Let's blow it up so that when we look at the social rank later, maybe it'll trend, right? Cool. Let's jump in. I'm going to have the judges quickly introduce themselves. And then I'll come back and go over the judging criteria so you can see how the judges actually will be judging as well. Let's start.
Okay. Oh. All right. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Y von, VP of HR compliance and enterprise risk management for Kaiser.
(Applause)
Yvonne:And I promise, I think I'm the nice one, you know. We have personas, right? And I'm going to be the kind one.
> RODNEY SAMPSON:You'll be like Barbara Cochran.
Good afternoon, Scott, CEO of inquest consulting, a global diversity and inclusion training and consulting organization. We have been in business for five years, a serial entrepreneur, I like that title. We have doubled in size every year in our five years in business, and are proud to be here judging this business, because we are a certified LGBT BE business. So the sister organization of the NGLCC, so happy to be here.
(Cheering and applause)
> RODNEY SAMPSON:Welcome.
Hello, everyone. My name is Amanda Snow, recruiting director for PNC financial in Pittsburgh. I've been with the company for 61/2 years. I'm here as part of my responsibilities of overseeing our diversity recruiting strategy, along with other areas. I'm really excited, and I promise I'll be nice.
(Laughter)
That leaves me, I guess.
> RODNEY SAMPSON:You can't be nice. They want it real and transparent. We want to go easy, right? Balance is the key. Okay. So, a little bit about the judging criteria, and then, of course, as well I'll tell you what's at stake, the prizes here. So, in essence, when coming up with the criteria for these companies, we wanted to to be meaningful for them. So we're asking things like, is it a bold idea? Does the idea swing for the fences and have the potential to change the world? And if successful, perhaps become a scalable business.
That's fair, right? Dream bigger, that's another hash tag. The next thing, great idea, but who's the team? Does the team that's being presented here have the skills and leadership to move forward on this idea? Very, very important. The next thing is the business model. You know. Will the idea actually make money, will people buy this product or service, or platform. And has a revenue model been defined, and is it realistic and sustainable?
The next one is execution. Is there strong customer growth or revenue in this company or this idea's future? The next thing is jobs. Will the idea create jobs if it's scaled and funded. The next thing was, will it have organizational impact, local impact, and/or national impact as well. The final two things are viability. Is the idea viable inside of a corporation's supply chain. And then finally, was the pitch concise and focused. Got it?
> AUDIENCE:Got it.
> RODNEY SAMPSON:There you go. All right. So the prizes so, fourthplace winner is going to get a meeting with the key executive from Merck, PricewaterhouseCoopers, or EY. That in itself is just amazing. Let's give it up.
(Applause)
> RODNEY SAMPSON:Just the opportunity to sit down with a decisionmaker. Third place winner gets a little bit more. We've got a $500 cash prize, all right. $250 Marriott gift card. And a 30minute business meeting by Marriott. The phone tile and the meetings with the key executives. All right. It gets a little bit better, all right?
(Applause)
> RODNEY SAMPSON:Secondplace winner gets all of that other cool stuff we talked about, and they get a stack. I'm sorry. That's the millennial way. $1,000, one stack, all right. But get this. The firstplace winner all right the firstplace winner gets all that other cool swag, all right, $5,000.
(Cheering and applause)
> RODNEY SAMPSON:All right? There you go. All right. I think we've got all of our housekeeping out of the way. And...
(Off microphone)
> RODNEY SAMPSON:Yeah.
(Off microphone)
> RODNEY SAMPSON:Oh, cool. Got to get the corporate swag in. $250 Walmart gift card, an Amazon Echo okay.
And all the other stuff.
> RODNEY SAMPSON:Do judges and moderators get swag? I mean, do we got to pitch? Can I pitch?
(Laughter)
> RODNEY SAMPSON:Nice. All right. So, I'm probably going to be the meanest person in the world. Do not take it personal. And I'm only just dealing with the stop clock, all right. So you get five minutes to pitch, and I'm just going to say time's up. All right? It's real simple. We want each person pitching to respect that. And then you'll have another four minutes for the judges to ask questions or what have you. And here's the strategy. If you don't get it all in five minutes, then get the rest in when they ask you questions, but concise and to the point.
All right. First up in the DOBE tank is Alex from Social Range. Let's give it up for her.
(Cheering and applause)
Hey, everybody. I'm Alex. I'm the cofounder and CEO of Social Rank and thanks for having me here. So, over the past ten years, brands and agencies have spent countless hours and billions of dollars building up massive audiences on social media. And they have no idea who these people are. They're getting more and more followers and reach, and they're really not doing anything with them besides broadcasting and reacting, tweeting, posting, sharing, pinning, and react is customer service.
And CEOs are starting to be like, we have a million followers, who are these people, what are we doing with them? So we built Social Rank, the easiest way to understand the audience on Twitter and Instagram. We help them understand and activate their audiences. I'm going to do a live demo in a minute. Hopefully that's enough time. But I'm going to fly through some slides. We have three main products, basic pulls in your followers from Twitter and Instagram and lets you see them and filter and sort through them.
If you want to see all your followers in Los Angeles, you could do that. We pull in your followers and let you slice and dice by location, interest, keywords, influence, engagement. We have market intelligent that lets you run any account, Coke can run Pepsi. We have Social Rank for Teens that lets you use both Social Rank and Market Intelligence in a private environment for your organization. We started the company in 2014. We raised over $2million from venture capitalists. Our team is six people now.
At the end of the year we started getting really serious about revenue because we did raise money from investors. That gave us time to figure out the product. We grew from 3K monthly recurring revenue in December to as of September, we're going 65K in monthly recurring revenue. We've grown 20% each month. We're a certified DOBE. The market size for the business, marketing software is a $20billion market. A report said this market will be $32.4billion by 2018, basically all TV ads and other ads that are coming to the internet which makes this a bigger business.
Some of our customers actually, as of last night, we have everyone from southwest airlines to Samsung, Sony music, soul cycle, YouTube, L'Oréal, etc. The business model, we have a basic free product. If you log in with your own personal or professional account, you get a free version of the product that you can use. It lets you see and sort and filter your followers. For $49 a month, you can get the premium version, which lets you take out the data, communicate with your audience, etc.