An Interview with Brian Magierski, in 2 parts
Contributed by Rod Amis

Austin, Texas’ Kalivo is a company that has jumped ahead of the curve in making the so-called “Web 2.0″ modalities relevant to enterprise. Instead of blogs or podcasts, Kalivo developed a Hub where your business can monitor what your current customers, potential customers and competitors are saying – all over the Web – about your enterprise and its products. This hub and its features go way beyond the information you get from focus groups and market analysts because they allow your team to not only monitor but also engage the people most likely to utilize, deploy, recommend or criticize your products and services.

LeverageSocialMedia found the Kalivo approach so unique and innovative that we wanted to sit down with one of the company’s founders, Brian Magierski.

LSM: Brian, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Let’s start with how you came to found Kalivo.

Magierski: I’m a mechanical engineer by training, but have worked in enterprise software and web-based startups for more than 11 years. I started with Wit Capital, the first online investment bank, in New York in 1996, while I was in Harvard Business School.

After graduating, I was recruited to Austin by Trilogy, a front-office enterprise software vendor, to start their consumer goods industry vertical. In early 1999, I left to start iMark.com, which was essentially an eBay for companies. Austin Ventures funded it, and we built an auction hub for companies to trade used equipment and surplus inventory. We had a bigger challenge than eBay in building liquidity due to the fragmented nature of asset trading, so we ended up building satellite exchanges that were sold as hosted software products – at the time called ASPs.

These satellite exchanges were sold to websites where buyers or sellers would aggregate. The website owner paid us a monthly fee and we shared commission revenue. FreeMarkets bought iMark.com in March 2000. Since then I’ve been investing in and consulting to web and software start-ups, ranging from email security to enterprise risk management, in addition to working on a couple of projects of my own.

Scott Brittain, my co-founder at Kalivo, has been a software engineering professional for more than 15 years, many in smaller companies or startups. Scott’s career evolved from programmer to product architect to team leader and eventually to several VP of Engineering posts at leading software organizations, including iMark, Ten Rivers, CoAgent, RealVue, and now Kalivo.

LSM: Kalivo seems to have made a conceptual leap in terms of how enterprises leverage the power of the various applications and tools that fall under the Web 2.0 rubric. What led to this?

Magierski: A conceptual leap in this market is certainly part of what we hoped to accomplish in starting Kalivo.

Since business school, I’ve had a strong interest in helping companies use technology to create deeper, longer-lasting and ultimately more valuable relationships with their customers. I had worked on a plan to provide marketers software applications to understand the value of their customer base and construct specialized offers online. At the time, this was referred to as “one-to-one marketing.” However, I did not think the technology or core attributes were in place to actually realize the vision of the value proposition.

Recently, the explosion of social media combined with the Web Services infrastructure of the Internet, collectively referred to as Web2.0, made me realize that the pieces are now in place to connect companies and customers in a rich way – both from social interaction as well as data perspectives. The most important aspect of this shift to social media was user-adoption, namely that people were voluntarily going onto the Web and contributing content – their opinions, feedback, ideas and more.

The fact that customers were engaged proactively meant – in a two-way medium such as the Web – that companies could engage directly with their customers to build and grow relationships, as well as track and measure the success of those connections.
 
Scott and I set out to provide a complete arsenal of applications for marketers to engage with their customers. We also wanted to add to the existing state-of-the-art applications and Web capabilities. So, we set out to provide value to the marketer by leveraging whatever best technologies and applications existed. This meant that the world of Web APIs, such as Google’s search engine, and the existing best standards such as RSS and trackbacks were on the table as starting blocks for us.

LSM: Looking to the future, what feedback do you get from the IT community about their needs, and how are you responding?

Magierski: The IT community has many of the same needs as the corporate community at large. They want alignment with their constituents’ goals, feedback on their own efforts, timely interaction on all topics, and a personalized experience. Moreover, by virtue of their technology-centered position, the IT community may actually be on the leading edge of adopting new solutions to these needs.

We’ve responded by enabling the IT-to-constituent engagement channel and, subsequently, layering value-adding services upon that channel. In this way, we can be responsive to the IT community while also allowing them to address their needs in an a la carte fashion.

LSM: It’s always great to talk directly to a company spokesman, but what is missing, as I’m sure you know, is unbiased perspective. Do you have a client/customer we can speak with about what they’ve learned since using your Hub?

Magierski: I’d like to refer to you one of our early adapters, ROME Corporation.

Tomorrow … How ROME Corp. uses Kalivo’s Hub and the lessons it has learned, as well as a follow-up interview with Brian Magierski.