Accord co-founders, Ross & Ryan Rich opening for Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, circa 2012

Right before the pandemic hit, Ryan Rich and his brother Ross left their job at Google and Stripe for their craziest adventure yet: founding Accord! They’d worked together in the past – performing as a hip-hop duo in college (yup, that’s them in the photo) and organizing countless fundraisers and concerts. Starting a VC-backed tech company was the next logical step for them, right?

It was late 2019 when they started Accord, the world’s first Customer Collaboration Platform. It’s a shared workspace so buyers and sellers can work together throughout the laborious B2B sales process—making it a lot more collaborative and a lot less painful. 

As part of the founding sales teams at Stripe (Ross) and Google Cloud (Ryan) saw how little innovation there was around the buyer <> seller relationship. Account executives were running multi-year, multi-stakeholder, multi-million dollar deals with email and conference calls. 

They went through Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 Batch and recently raised $6M from Stripe. Some of their early customers include Figma, Productboard, and Very Good Security.

Connecting with the minds behind Accord

I caught up with co-founders of Accord, Ross and Ryan Rich, who talked with me about the future of their company and the world of B2B sales.

Q: Accord takes a buyer-first approach, what exactly does this mean and why did you decide to take this approach?

As sales reps, Ryan and Ross shared that they used to think closing a deal was hard work… But that was before they started talking to buyers about their experience. After interviewing dozens of buyers while getting Accord off the ground, they quickly learned what it was like to be on the other side of the table.  

“In retrospect, we really had no idea how challenging it was to actually buy something! The legal reviews, security reviews, consensus building, budget negotiations. Most evaluations end in no decision AND there are over 10 decision-makers just on the buying team.” 

There are thousands of sales tools that focus on making life easier for the sales team—yet none built with the buying experience in mind. This is the perfect example of how sales aren’t truly focused on the most important person in the sales cycle: the buyer!

Q: There’s mention of moving from“Vendorship” to “Partnership”, what exactly does this mean? 

Ryan shared his perspective on what Accord’s tagline “From Vendorship to Partnership” really means: 

“A vendor is focused on their product and selling as much of it as possible. They love talking about bells, whistles, and discounts. (No one wants to work with a vendor.) 

A partner, on the other hand, is a subject matter expert concerned with helping their buyers make the best possible decision. The modern buyer comes to the table looking to collaborate. They want a partner to help them think about their business and its challenges. Take Figma for example. Companies want to buy from Figma because they want a partner to help them with their overall design and creative process, not simply because of a function or feature.”

Q: How will B2B sales evolve in the future? 

Think of everything that’s happened in the B2C buying process in the last 20 years…buying insurance, a trip abroad, or a new car. It’s frictionless and a human is only involved in the last 20% of the process (if at all). That’s coming to the B2B world. 

Buyers are begging for a different buying experience and sales leaders are struggling to keep up. Especially at more traditional enterprise organizations. Ryan believes that there’s about to be an explosion of technology to support this new relationship. There’s no way email, Slack, conference calls, and shared docs are going to cut it. You can’t replicate a frictionless B2C experience using home-grown tools. 

It’s an expensive problem and you are already starting to see a lot of new startups, like Accord, in the space.

Q: What are some actionable strategies B2B sales reps can implement to put their buyers first?

Build empathy for your buyers. The more a sales team understands their buyers, the better they can help them. Take time to interview your buyers after as many won and lost deals as possible. What was the most painful part of the sales process, where did they experience the most friction? Ryan also recommends a recent article on positioning yourself as a partner and how build empathy for your buyers. 

Most teams are afraid to ask their buyers about their experience—especially when deals were lost. Buyers are surprisingly open to helping their selling counterparts learn and improve.

Q: What are the plans for the recent fundraise? What’s the future hold for Accord? 

Off the back of their recent $6M seed round fundraise (led by Stripe & YC), Accord is staying laser-focused on building the Accord Customer Collaboration Platform to help revenue leaders create a repeatable, collaborative sales motion. 

This includes: investing even more in our R&D team (across engineering, product, and design), as well as starting to scale the GTM side of Accord with new hires in sales and marketing. 

Feel free to reach out to Ryan to talk B2B sales, hip hop, or whatever’s on your mind: ryan@inaccord.com, LinkedIn, or subscribe to Accord’s newsletter.

The post How These Brothers Went from Hip-Hop Duo to Transforming the World of B2B Sales appeared first on ReadWrite.

The typical startup story begins with a couple founders in a garage ready to build the next greatest thing in technology. The Superfly story was a bit different. This story is about four founders who wanted to pursue something they loved rather than the finance, accounting, and administrative careers their degrees trained them for.

The early days

Back in 1995 Jonathan Mayers graduated from Tulane University in New Orleans and landed a job booking talent at a venue called Tipitina’s – a legendary New Orleans landmark for music. Shortly after, Jonathan was joined by Kerry Black and Rick Farman who were both still enrolled in University at the time. The trio ran the operation for Tipitina’s until they were ready for their next move.

Jonathan, Rick, and Kerry were then joined by Rich Goodstone, a high-school friend of Jonathan’s, to build their legacy – Superfly. They spent the next few years promoting and selling out shows at JazzFest, organizing events at Mardi Gras, and absorbing as much experience as they could in the industry.

Now, with some experience and credentials under their belts the four knew it was time for a Superfly owned and operated experience. 

The Superfly festival experience

Music festivals are one of the most beautiful intersections of culture, technology, art, people, and so much more. Only if they are done correctly…

The Superfly model was simple. Build communities and tribes around shared passions. The first go-around was Bonnaroo in Manchester, Tennessee. The team managed to sell tens of thousands of tickets, backed up traffic for miles, and most importantly created a tribe on their first go-around. It was a huge success.

The next “a ha” moment came when the team realized they’d created the perfect engagement platform for brands. The biggest brands in the world also strive to build a tribe of loyal customers around their products and services. So partnering with brands on-site at their festivals or building out stand alone live experiences was a no-brainer.

Today, Superfly has expanded into building live experiences for a range of brands and entertainment properties and is always upping its creative game.

Connecting with the minds behind Superfly

I caught up with one of the co-founders of Superfly, Rich Goodstone, who talked to me about what the future of this exciting space holds for the company.

Q: What do you see as the future of shared experiences and what trends are you following?

Goodstone: We are really interested in the fandom around specific entertainment properties and how IRL experiences can enhance that relationship. This year we created a Friends 25th Anniversary experience, the first ever BravoCon. We were truly blown away by the sense of community fans share. It illustrates the power of experiences that are tailored to a specific community of fans. We think there will be major growth in this area in all formats of live experiences and will expand beyond entertainment brands. If the experience is special enough, fans will pay to attend.

Q: You started out as a music festival business and now that you are working more with brands. We also noticed you’ve recently invested in a sound/sensory experience company. Why is sound important?

Goodstone: Voice enabled tech is here and it’s how the next generation will interact with brands and go about their daily lives. Brands are grappling with their sound strategy beginning with how their brand identity translates to sound to what their voice should be. It’s also going to have a major impact on the world of experiences and we want to be on the forefront of that. We took a look at all of the companies in the sound space and Listen stood out to us as real pioneers in the space. We are bullish on the future of sound and with Listen now a part of our team we are offering brands new approaches across immersive experience, UX sound design, voice marketing/branding, audio effectiveness research, and podcasts.

Q: How will music and technology evolve in the near future?

Goodstone: The next frontier for music festivals is immersive digital experiences and we’ve recently partnered with Two Bit Circus on the west coast to explore ways to bring tech and music together. We hosted a series with them called Superbit, where a curated group of third party developers and creators came together to showcase, test, and get feedback on new projects. We invited the creative music-tech community to gather and experience new paradigms for fans to engage with music and for artists to share their stories. We’ll continue to explore this area of creativity and we can’t wait to see how it will shape the future of the music festival experience.

Q: What’s next for Superfly?

Goodstone: Our mission is to shape how the world plays and connects. As a part of realizing our mission, we are building Superfly to become a hub for creativity. We are actively looking for companies to invest in and partner to help us push the boundaries of what is possible through live experiences.

In 2020 we’ll continue to explore experiences of all types and formats.  We’re exploring the area of sports, creative conferences and location based experiences. There will be opportunities for brands, especially TV/Movie properties, to build experiences that can stand alone as more permanent attractions. We had such success with the recent Friends Experience in New York and we’ve launched a second run in Boston that has also been very well received. As I mentioned before, it’s all about tapping into communities of fandom and giving them an experience tailored to them.

We’ll also continue to build Outside Lands as a premier music and food festival. This year we were the first major music festival to have legalized sale and consumption of cannabis on site and our experience called Grasslands was a huge success. We enjoy reimagining live experiences and the effects it can have on making this world a more joyful place. 

The post Superfly’s New Frontier: How the Company That Reinvented Music Festivals is Doing the Same for Branded Experiences appeared first on ReadWrite.

In conjunction with the 2nd Annual San Francisco Blockchain Week last week; PlayTable and ToyBox announced they’ve entered into a strategic partnership focused on enabling blockchain for toys, souvenirs, and collectibles designed and printed on the Toybox 3D Printer.

PlayTable and Toybox look to capitalize on the tailwinds and fusion of blockchain for collectibles and gaming purposes

Big name consumer toy and collectible brands, as well as gaming companies, are all searching for ways to incorporate and leverage blockchain technology in their business. Digital collectible AR/VR platform Terra Virtua  partnered with WAX Blockchain to enable gamers to take real dollars-and-cents ownership of in-game purchases.

The NBA, National Basketball Players Association and Dapper Labs (the creator of ‘CryptoKitties’) partnered to launch a platform called NBA Top Shot for basketball fans to purchase, trade and own digital collectibles like sports shirts on a blockchain.

CBS Interactive partnered with Lucid Sight to release the first generation of Star Trek True Digital Crypto Collectibles of Six iconic ships from the Trek universe as digitally minted, cryptographically secured, collectibles, that can be played within Lucid Sight’s game Crypto Space Commander, a space MMO sandbox that utilizes blockchain to power its Play To Own user economy.

There is no shortage of ideas being pursued to address this market, and rightfully so. The market opportunity to build a business model fusing collectibles and gaming is tremendous. Collectibles are estimated to be a $370-billion-dollar market while gaming, including board games and card games, is nearly a $200-billion-dollar addressable market. This partnership between PlayTable and Toybox will aim to bridge those two industries.

PlayTable and Toybox’s partnership aims to expand PlayTable’s unique Toy-Reality offering, which is the confluence between physical toys, digital gaming, and blockchain

Toybox is the Shark Tank funded 3D printing toy company for kids that interacts with smartphones or computers to allow kids to create their own toys. Users can select from pre-loaded toy designs or they can even use ToyBox as a regular 3D printer.

PlayTable is the world’s first tabletop board game gaming console that is blockchain-enabled. Powered by the VeChainThor blockchain technology and native EHrT tokens, kids and adults alike will be able to design toys that are equipped with RFID technology and link Virtual Integrated Metadata (VIM) – PlayTable’s non-fungible token – to it. When used with PlayTable’s interactive surface the toys come to life in a world and digital game experience that entirely new ground for  board games, video games, and educational programs.

By utilizing and burning EHrT tokens to mint VIMs, this process ensures that every toy is unique with its own story and statistics. When used alongside the PlayTable console, players will be able to control characters in the real world, and have their moves updated on display, store progress, experience, digital goods, special abilities, etcetera on the toy and in the blockchain ledger.

The biggest unknown for blockchain with regards to collectibles and gaming is how to increase adoption and make blockchain more accessible and understandable by the mainstream consumer

Some of the most innovative minds trying to tackle this problem came together to speak on the subject at the San Francisco Blockchain event, including Sunny Lu (Co-founder & CEO at VeChain), Xiaoning Nan (Founder & CEO at OceanEx), Zack (Co-founder & COO at CyberX), Alyssa Tsai (Founder & CEO at PANONY and PANews), and John Dempsey, (CEO at PlayTable & Founding Director at 8Hours). The panel addressed a variety of ideas on how to let users easily navigate and explore blockchain and its related tools to not only address public concerns; but also to increase adoption efforts. 

Sunny Lu (Co-founder & CEO at VeChain) spoke a lot about blockchain’s practical business applications as well as VeChain. CEO and Founding Director at 8Hours, John Dempsey, echoed Sunny Lu by commenting on VeChain’s blockchain solutions and how conducive they are for actual business models and how he believe PlayTable is cracking that code.

The partnership will act as a gateway to blockchain for the mainstream consumer

This idea of having a physical object act as an intermediary between user and blockchain helps the user explore and interact with it easier. This, in general, will help users understand the blockchain as well as dispel any concerns that they may have over security, or even how transactions function.

PlayTable and ToyBox help bring users into the PlayTable ecosystem and community by giving them a physical means to interact with it. This gives people a stake within the community, as well as a reason to continually interact with that community, all while having fun. Lastly, PlayTable also introduces users to blockchain-related tools, such as wallets. 

The ultimate goal is to give users the physical means to interact with this technology, all while having fun and creating memories. ToyBox and PlayTable work together to expand the imagination and challenge how we traditionally think of play.

The post ToyBox and PlayTable Partner Together For Blockchain Enabled Toys, Souvenirs, and Collectibles appeared first on ReadWrite.

One of the most important things to assemble as an entrepreneur is a winning team. That’s exactly what Gene Wang and David Moss of People Power Company did.

Gene met David while working at a telecommunications company – BitFone. Gene served as CEO and David as a lead engineer. BitFone’s software was used in more than 300 million phones, and was adopted by 3 of the top 5 mobile operators and all of the top 6 handset manufacturers. BitFone was acquired by HP for $160 million in 2007.

In 2009, Gene had his “aha” moment when he connected the dots on the potential of the connected world. Gene realized that every light, door, car, switch, meter, home, building, and more should be connected. It was obvious to him that IoT would be 10- to 100-times the market size of mobility. In 2009, Gene and David founded People Power Company and started recruiting stars from the Bitfone team.

People Power Co., The Early Days

People Power Company is Gene Wang’s fifth startup. He is what’s known as a “serial entrepreneur”, a well-deserved title for Wang. Gene’s focus has always been about helping people and the world, while engaging in the pursuit of profits. The motivation for Gene’s most current mission was fueled by a circumstance that hit uncomfortably close to home.

On a day when Gene took his kids to school, he noticed essays posted on the hallway walls. He was disheartened to see how many students were severely concerned about the planet’s future and wellbeing. This was the catalyst for People Power’s first product – GreenX – designed with the goal of using connected device technology to make the household run with greater energy efficiency. The business grew, and People Power now delivers IoT services for some of the world’s largest consumer service providers, including:

• • China Mobile, supporting more than 6 million subscribers
  • BGE (Baltimore Gas and Electric) used in thousands of homes
  • PepCo used in over 600 homes
  • DelMarva used in over 1,000 homes

The energy business was running great, but Gene felt there was another more impactful opportunity on the horizon. This was triggered after caring for his mother, 83, who’d fallen three times and required increasingly more attention. It was at this point that Gene knew he had to tackle the complex issues related to family care. 

Presence Family Care Pack, A Connected Bond for Loved Ones

People Power’s mission is to provide IoT solutions that solve day-to-day challenges for today’s consumers. Answering that call, the Presence Family Care Pack was introduced on October 8th, 2019, to solve some important challenges by providing an all-encompassing solution for the day-to-day tasks of family caregiving. The solution includes:

• A gateway, 2 door sensors, 3 motion detectors, an iOS or Android app, voice support, and cloud services for senior care.
• A Trusted Circle of family and friends can be created. This group is alerted when the system detects a potential danger (falls, wandering, excessive bathroom visits, and more).
• Expanded to support Alexa, Google Home, smart plugs, water leak sensors, and other connected devices.

Gene was happy to provide a solution that covered the bases for remote family care and monitoring. But that wasn’t enough. The technology was only the first step. People Power wanted to connect more than just the devices.

What sets the Presence Family Care Pack apart from other solutions is its capacity to enable essential human motivations. It connects loved ones on an emotional and personal level. For instance, members of the trusted circle of friends and family can be reminded to contact their loved ones to minimize senior loneliness, among other features.

People Power has been changing lives for the better, and their accomplishments were recognized by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). They recently received a $4.5 million grant from NIH to help caregivers better care for people with Alzheimer’s or dementia.

Putting that Grant to work

Every day 10,000 people in the United States turn 65. In 15 years there will be 78 million people over the age of 65, compared to 76.4 million under the age of 18. Over 90-percent of these folks want to live at home, and over 70-percent of them are going to need care. 

With new funding in hand, People Power continues to build their family care solutions. Inspired by the NIH grant, one of the most prominent features of a forthcoming version will be a caregiver support function that addresses feelings of caregiver loneliness and isolation. In addition, this version will support task management to enable caregivers to more easily delegate heavy workloads to other professionals.

It’s exciting to see such an innovative team working on a product that solves problems that hit so close to home. We’ll have to wait and see what Gene and his team surprise us with next!

Until then, visit their product website (www.PresenceFamily.com) to see the amazing work, and don’t forget to listen to their band –the People Power Band.

The post People Power Company. Humanizing the Internet of Things. appeared first on ReadWrite.