VP, Digital Marketing

Polaris portfolio company Modelinia is actively seeking a VP of Digital Marketing to help lead the internet marketing and social media strategy, efforts and success. Full details below:

Modelinia, New York or San Francisco, NY (San Francisco, CA)

Modelinia is a multi-platform media brand where supermodels share their fashion, beauty and lifestyle secrets. Modelinia connects women to fashion, beauty and lifestyle through unique access to the world’s top supermodels. Those supermodels reveal their secrets, ordinary and extraordinary, to help our audience gain the “style confidence” to look and feel their best. The result is compelling and unique content that will live on the internet, television, and at live events. Modelinia revenues come from advertising sponsored content, ecommerce and social media applications, such as games.

Modelinia was born from Full Picture, a strategic marketing, production, and public relations firm founded by CEO, Desiree Gruber. Full Picture’s award-winning team lives and works at the crossroads of fashion, design, television and technology, handling public relations for supermodels Heidi Klum, Hilary Rhoda, Brooklyn Decker, and brands such as Victoria’s Secret, Frederic Fekkai, and many more. They were also the creators of Project Runway and the unique viral series for Microsoft’s MSN called Style Studio.

Modelinia’s funding is provided by Polaris Venture Partners, a Waltham, MA – based partnership of experienced private equity investors, operating executives and entrepreneurs. Polaris’ mission is to identify, invest in and partner with seed, early stage, and middle market businesses with exceptional promise and help them grow into market-leading companies. A national private equity firm with offices in Boston and Seattle, Polaris invests in businesses throughout the United States and selectively in Europe and Asia. Polaris has over $3 billion under management, more than 20 investment professionals, and current investments in more than 90 companies.

REPORTING RELATIONSHIPS:
The VP, Digital Marketing will report to the Chief Executive Officer of Modelinia.

RESPONSIBILITIES:
The VP, Digital Marketing will be responsible for:

•Creating and executing a winning user acquisition strategy, including but not limited to paid search, natural search and social media;

•Developing and executing a comprehensive engagement strategy focused on user activity and retention;

•Designing and managing quantitative measurement programs (internet marketing and social media campaigns) that can track, measure, and analyze performance;

•Developing a Modelinia email strategy and campaign that is analytical, exciting and engaging;

•Working effectively with existing and potential partners across strategic, marketing and product opportunities;

•Foster an active / engaged Modelinia community and manage creative, ongoing contests and events;

•Work cross-functionally with the engineering and monetization teams.

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS & EXPERIENCE:
The ideal VP, Digital Marketing candidate has the following characteristics:

•Extensive experience in internet marketing: SEM, SEO and affiliate marketing;

•Deep understanding of social media and community management: both onsite and on sites like Facebook and Twitter;

•Excellent analytical skills and ability to synthesize large amounts of data and information into concise recommendations and action for the company;

•Experience in product management and project management across cross-functional teams and projects;

•Great communication and presentation skills;

•Deep familiarity with web development technologies;

•Comfort and ability to work in fast-paced, agile environment.

Inside Facebook recently posted that

Earlier this year, we speculated on when Facebook would launch APIs for Facebook Ads to allow performance marketers to automate ad management. Well, it appears it’s happening now: recently, Facebook started beta testing its new advertising APIs with just a few agencies around the world.

This is a pretty interesting development for several reasons.

Most directly, it is another sign of the Google-ification of Facebook — that is, Facebook getting serious about being a (if not the) leading platform for performance advertising, as Ad Words is today.  Not a huge surprise here, what with the infiltration of lots of senior Google talent, from Sheryl Sandberg on down.

More interesting to me, though, is the question whether the availability of Facebook’s advertising API presents an opportunity for new startups to build tools for advertisers to optimize their Facebook ad spend, just as players like Efficient Frontier and other SEM companies have for the AdWords platform.

Will we see a new category of marketing tools and services startups — instead of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Social Network Marketing (SNM) companies?

And, if so, will they be confused with “S&M” companies??

A topic that continually fascinates me, and about which I sometimes blog, is how to construct startup management teams.  A startup is a very different business at the different stages of its evolution, with different challenges and leadership needs, making the task of having the right set of skills/experiences/passions around the table a never-ending challenge.

The “ideal” startup board changes over time as well.

I always prefer small boards to large boards. Small boards actually can get stuff done and allow the entrepreneur to focus on building his/her business. The larger the board gets the more the task of managing the board and extracting decisions becomes a job in and of itself.

This is especially true during the very early stage of a startup’s life, when the team is focused on building/launching a product, or is still in the phase of rapid iteration to find product/market fit.

Some argue that during these stages a startup should not even have a board.  I am tempted to agree but, especially if some capital has been raised, I think this is unrealistic. What I would say is that the board should be *very* small (2 or 3), and should be primarily focused on providing help to the entrepreneur and otherwise staying out of his or her way.  Board members (particularly those of the VC flavor, ahem…) like to see themselves as “adding value,” so the more of them you have and the more of a production board meetings become, the more complicated your life becomes.  That is a hindrance, not a help.

There are some things a board needs to do during these early days, but there is a lot of other stuff board members like to dwell on that, while important later in the startup’s life, really are distractions now.  You want to be maniacally focused on getting your product built and seeing what customers think. And your shareholders want you focused there.  So do everyone a favor by building a small board that appreciates the medical profession’s Hippocratic Oath: First Do No Harm.

Congrats to our portfolio company Emo Labs, which was named Best of DEMO.

Emo makes invisible speakers, which produce sound by vibrating a thin clear film of plastic. So, for example, a flat panel TV’s screen itself can serve as its speakers. Go here to see CEO Jason Carlson explaining how it works.

Lots of great new announcements coming out of Dogpatch Labs today–expanding to Cambridge, MA; growing in SF; a new logo and Facebook and Twitter pages. More details over at DogpatchLabs.com. And, some nice coverage in TechCrunch, Boston.com, and Xconomy.

One of the most satisfying and challenging parts of a VC’s job is helping startup founders build their management team. It’s one of the areas where your VC can really add value. It’s also an area where we can really screw things up. Take it from me, because I’ve done it.

One of the hardest things about building a startup organization is that a successful startup is effectively 2 or 3 radically different companies between founding and achieving substantial commercial value.  And the people who will be great at one of those different stages often will be pretty lousy at the other stages. In particular, the proven senior executive who is fantastic at executing and operating during the scaling phase often is a great executive but a not-so-great entrepreneur.  So one of the mistakes we often are tempted into making is hiring that exec before the company is ready for him/her.

In one of the best posts on startup success I have read, Marc Andreesen wrote:

“The life of any startup can be divided into two parts: before product/market fit (call this “BPMF”) and after product/market fit (“APMF”).”

This dividing line is critical to informing many different aspects of what the startup needs to be doing, one of the more important being informing the right team that should be on the field. During the before product/market fit period, I would argue that it is critical that the startup be led and populated by highly entrepreneurial individuals — individuals who are creative, risk-taking, willing to change course quickly and decisively, all in the name of finding product/market fit. And, while this is a gross generalization, very often the executives who will become critical to taking the company the distance actually are not nearly entrepreneurial enough to excel during the BPMF stage.  Whereas later stage successful startups typically should be run by executives who excel at scaling a business and its organization, early stage BPMF startups typically are best off being led by highly entrepreneurial founders with great product sensibilities.

Ironically enough, what led me to this post is a conversation I had with a CEO candidate for one of my companies.  While the board felt that the company’s founder was excelling at many aspects of the CEO job, both the Board and the founder agreed that an experienced CEO would have a huge impact scaling the business. And, even though we weren’t yet an APMF company ready for the scaling phase, the board figured it made sense to go out and find a CEO now, especially considering we would need to raise another financing round next year and investors for that round would likely look for a CEO who could take the business “to the next level.”  So we launched a CEO search.

And last week I was speaking with a candidate who probably is the perfect candidate for this business, and had a fantastically refreshing conversation.  The candidate pushed me to articulate why I thought we needed a CEO now, and why we weren’t better off hiring some mid-level folks now to help the current team respond to a growing wave of customer interest, and put off hiring a CEO until the company had enough time in the market to nail product/market fit and really be ready to scale.

And he was exactly right. Duh.

So next time your VC argues for hiring a senior exec, make sure the spec for the job fits the stage of your startup.

After three blissful weeks without once boarding a plane, I am back in the air, en route to SF via Virgin America.

And once again they exceed expectations.  Head pounding, I ask the flight attendant, William, if they have aspirin. He returns with a veritable headache care package: 14 Tylenol, swiss chocolate, coffee (yes, I broke my no-caffeine pledge for the cause). 30 minutes later, headache is gone. XXX asks me how I am feeling, and then, further asks me how I like the Virgin America product. And, he genuinely cares. Turns out William was a senior flight attendant for USAir, but tired of the discontent and low quality of service, and gave up his pension and other benefits of seniority to join Virgin America where he could be proud of his employer.

Yes, happy employees and great customer service make a difference.

Keep it up , Virgin!

Back in July, we hosted a customer development workshop for some Polaris portfolio companies and Dog Patch Labs denizens, lead by Eric Ries and Sean Ellis.

Eric took content from his Lean Startup approach, and Sean from his 12in6 consulting practice, and they created a bangup workshop.

We asked participants to share feedback, and I thought I would share some of what we heard.  The group greatly valued the concreteness of the discussion, and the favorite takeaway was “the iteration loop to finding product market fit and the real world example of companies testing product/market fit and pivoting until they find it.” The following two quotes sum up the group’s reactions:

“We gained a lot out of the event.  It was really well suited to what we’re working on, and we’ve taken some of the strategies from the talk and put them to practice.  Thanks for inviting us, and would love to attend future events.”

“Great workshop! I thought I’ve read all your blog postings but still came away very impressed.”

Thanks to Eric and Sean for a fantastic workshop. Stay tuned for word on other workshops this fall.

Like all the other social web geeks out there, I have been captivated by the notion that the social advertising revolution presents an opportunity to build the web’s next billion dollar business. Yes, I drank the Kool-Aid — whole damn pitcher of it.

But then my bubble would get burst and I would float back to reality when I speak with more level headed web media/advertsing types who would point out that all this buzz for social advertising was spinning out of what actually were meager experimental ad campaigns, and I’d start to feel like my web 1.0 brethren who couldn’t stop proselyting how their petfood.com portfolio company was going to be the next big IPO.  I guess it is an occupational hazard that early stage VCs often get wildly excited about their investments — and often are wrong.

However, over the course of the last week, I noticed something. Many of those same damn sober-headed, straight-laced analytical types who typically burst my bubble are coming around to the view that the big brands are deadly serious about social advertising and are starting to allocate very real NON-experimental 2010 ad budget dollars to the category.

When you see both wild-eyed web zealots AND the bubble-bursters believing in something, then you know it is coming…right?

If July and August are any indications, the second half of 2009 is shaping up pretty nicely for the Polaris portfolio, especially considering we are in a recession. (Yes, this post is shameless promotion, but given the events of the last year I am not going to apologize for celebrating good news).

Fresh on the heels of the highly successful LogMeIn IPO in July, today our portfolio company Athenix is announcing that it has agreed to be acquired by Bayer Crop Sciences in a fantastic outcome for all parties.

Congrats to Athenix, and my partner Amir Nashat!