The document summarizes Matt Tucker's experience as CTO and Co-Founder of Jive Software over 12 years. It discusses how the company initially focused on discussion forums but found more success with customer support communities. It also describes balancing customer demands with their mission to change how work gets done, challenges of scaling to the enterprise like meeting technical requirements, and tips they used to overcome obstacles.

1. Learning how to bring home
the bacon as a tech founder
Matt Tucker, CTO & Co-Founder Jive Software

2. Jive So Far: a 12 Year Journey

3. Early Days: Finding Product Value
• Started with a discussion forums product for companies.
Won deals based on technology: most scalable, best
features, best design.
• Quickly noticed a pattern of where we were succeeding
more: customer support communities.
• Eventually had to swallow a hard lesson: engineering effort
!= customer value.
Tip: Avoid the trap of the single giant customer that controls
your destiny

4. Fixing Pain is Better Than Providing Comfort
$6.25/pair $11.88/pair

5. Balance Customer Demand With Your Mission
• At the end of 2004, faced a choice: double down on
customer support use-case or pursue the riskier dream of
a new and larger market?
• Decision: embrace the risk. Moved company to
Portland, re-factored everything
• Settled on an ambitious mission: change the way that
work gets done

6. The Enterprise Wall
• Are you a viable company?
• Will you fit into my tech
existing landscape?
• Compliance, security, SSO,
LDAP, IE7, scalability, etc.
• Will I get fired if I buy from
you?
• What’s the ROI?
• Where are you in the Gartner
Magic Quadrant?

7. Tips for Scaling the Enterprise Wall
• Prove your company has staying power through great
financials or a great VC (ideally both)
• Hire the gray-hairs
• Go Nascar with customer logos
• Some of the enterprise technical requirements are
stupid, but you should master them anyway
• Use bottoms-up adoption techniques (freemium, mobile)
• Understand that you’re not the center of the world for your
buyers

8. JIVE WHAT MATTERS
ACTIVITY STREAMS NOISE FILTERING RECOMMENDATIONS INTELLIGENCE PREDICTIONS
ANALYTICS IDEATION MOBILE VIDEO
JIVE APPS SOCIAL MEDIA
MARKET ENGAGEMENT
SOCIAL MARKETING SOCIAL INTRANET SOCIAL CUSTOMER
CLOUD APPS & SALES SERVICE
JIVE ENGAGE PLATFORM
JIVE CONNECTS
@
OUTLOOK OFFICE CONTENT
ENTERPRISE IM
MANAGEMENT
CUSTOMER EXISTING ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS
BUILT APPS
CONTENT COMMUNICATION SYSTEM OF RECORD

9. Matt Tucker
@MattTucker
matt@jivesoftware.com