Posts Tagged ‘G/Score’

All posts tagged G/Score.

LeWeb ’11 Startup Competition Deadline Is October 15

Posted: by chrisshipley on October 5th, 2011 | No Comments »

Categorized: Europe, G/Score, Startups

This year, Guidewire Group is a partner with LeWeb’11 to produce the Startup Competition at the Paris conference, December 7 – 9.  Eligible companies will have less than $1M in financing and will introduce their latest product during the conference. To date, more than 500 startups have used our new G/SCORE(tm)software platform to apply for one of the coveted 16 finalist spots at the event.

Thanks to those entrepreneurs who have already completed their applications. They have thrown their hats in the ring to compete with an impressive group of startups and we wish all of them good luck!

From the applications we receive by the deadline, 36 companies will invited to compete in the next round of judging. Companies will submit a short video pitch that tells us why your company is among the most innovative in the SoLoMo space. We’ll contact contestants by October 31 with the results of the first round of judging. If you’re in the next round, we’ll share details about the video competition.

All applicants to the LeWeb Startup Competition have early, complimentary access to Guidewire Group’s G/SCORE Analytics application to benchmark their businesses and track their progress against other startups. By keeping the G/SCORE profile up to date, your business’s progress and success will also be visible to investors, corporate partners and M&A executives who use the G/SCORE Analytics application to find and track innovative startups.

For those who have not yet completed a LeWeb Startup Competition application, please see the instructions below for logging in to complete a profile and  G/SCORE self-assessment. It only takes a few minutes to complete the process. Applications are due by October 15, 2011 and we can only consider completed applications.

Steps For Completing Self-Assessment:
Once you’ve logged into the application (http://leweb.guidewiregroup.net), there are three tabs at the top: FOLLOW, DISCOVER, and SCORE. Click the SCORE tab. You should then see a drop down that contains all the companies you’ve created and are following. Select your company in that drop down if it’s not already selected. Click Begin Assessment to complete self assessment.

Steps for Requesting Certified Assessment:
After Completing a Self Assessment, you will be taken back to the main SCORE page. This page will now show the date which you created the assessment and some options to perform on that assessment, such as Publish or Request. Click the Request link to request a certified assessment. You will then be taken to a form. Provide a URL to a video if you so choose. Make some notes for the reviewer also if you so choose. Lastly, click submit. Then you’re done.

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Guidewire Group Resets and Taps New Talent

Posted: by carlacthompson on November 27th, 2010 | No Comments »

Categorized: Uncategorized

Surely you know the story of the Shoemaker’s Children.  The old chap was so busy crafting footwear for his customers that his own progeny went barefoot.

Sometimes, it feels that way around Guidewire Group.  Even as we advise startups on their strategy and admonish them to market effectively, we ourselves struggle to keep up appearances.  Our own business strategy was a bit too vague and our services too complex to deliver with leverage.  The Guidewire Group Web site is, frankly, a little unkempt, and our Twitter stream is more of a drizzle.  If farm fences had as few posts as our blog, all cattle would be free range.

In short, we realized we needed to do better.  So late last summer, we rolled up our sleeves and got down to work on our own business.  We tightened our focus (the No. 1 thing we advise our clients), re-prioritized our resources, cleaned up our product offerings, and developed a strong story that has been resonating with customers.

Over the next 45 days, we’ll be rolling out these changes.  We’ll be talking about our new platform that enables startups to assess themselves using the G/SCORE methodology.  We’re opening a business acceleration center in the heart of Silicon Valley.   The Web site gets a face lift and a content boost.  We’ll streamline our online presence and work harder to share with the larger Innovation Ecosystem the insights we gain by working closely with smart startups.   We’ll deliver to the market a clear message about who we are, why we do what we do and for whom we do it.

At the heart of all this change is a great team, and I couldn’t be more proud of the work we’ve done to re-start Guidewire Group to better serve the Innovation Ecosystem.   Guidewire Group co-founder Mike Sigal takes his seat on the board of directors and will work with me on strategic direction.  Filling his role in business development is Michelle Messina, who will oversee the growth of our exciting programs designed to support Economic Development Agencies in the U.S. and around the world.  Erica Lee anchors our operations and marketing practice, delivering her special brand of “getting things done.”   And as always, Alice Mar is the rudder of the business, making sure we stay the fiscal course and grow our business responsibly.

We could not have found a better or more passionate person to drive our work with worldwide economic development agencies than Michelle. She has deep experience working with international startups and running government-sponsored business acceleration programs.  Her credentials in this essential community are long:  President of Explora International, the co-founder of the French Business & Innovation Accelerator (FBIA), an advisor to the Mexico-Silicon Valley Business Accelerator TechBA, , a board member for Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship and an Advisor (SAGE) at the Larta Institute.  Perhaps most importantly, Michelle shares Guidewire Group’s vision of fostering innovation around the world.

This vision drives the new Guidewire Group, as we endeavor to be a catalyst for entrepreneurship, startup growth and sustainability, and economic development and job creation around the world.  If you’ve not heard enough from us in the past, consider this fair warning:  we’ve got plenty to say and we’re raising our profile in the year ahead.

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What I Learned at Our First Pitch Slams

Posted: by chrisshipley on March 11th, 2010 | No Comments »

Categorized: G/Score, Innovate!Europe

Last week, Guidewire Group  kicked off the Innovate 2010 program with Pitch Slam events in Zaragoza and Madrid.  In all, 22 companies presented their businesses in our fast-paced, 5-minute format designed to quickly tease out a company’s market opportunity, unique differentiation, and execution against plans.  As company’s pitch the business, our esteemed judges evaluate the startups using our G/Score methodology.

To refresh your memory, the G/Score is an assessment of a company’s business opportunity and market traction at a point in time. The seven-factor score looks at overall concept, market opportunity and challenges, product and business execution, team and business model.  The G/Score is not intended to be a predictor of success or to be a substitute for diligence.  It is a gauge of potential and performance.

Since introducing the G/Score (first privately to hundreds of executives and entrepreneurs and then publicly earlier this year), we’ve been asked a lot of questions, as you would expect, about the efficacy of the G/Score.  Is it “accurate”?  Does it successfully predict winners?  And perhaps the most incredulous one: How can you judge a company in just 5 minutes?!

In a world as fraught with execution risk, hard work and luck, it’s difficult to know what “accurate” might mean in the context of a startup business.  The G/Score isn’t a measure like weight or height that can be compared to an absolute scale.  Startups have no absolute scale.  But the G/Score does accurately assesses where a company is today.  At what stage is product development?  How complete is the team?

Does this accurate assessment predict success? I’d argue that the G/Score is an assessment of potential.  Continued execution on the business, smart reaction to the market, and a commitment to product excellent drive success.

Most importantly, it turns out, The G/Score provides a common language and a foundation for constructive conversations between entrepreneurs and the marketplace.  And that’s what makes the G/Score a valuable tool in assessing companies in 5-minute Pitch Slams or in hour-long one-on-one meetings.

Every day, startups submit their businesses to quick judgment from investors, customers, potential partners.  They do it at events like the Innovate!2010 Pitch Slams, at conferences, competitions, and meetups.  Often, the judging criteria is little more than a gut feeling and a wet finger int he air.

What we’ve found in just a very short time is that the G/Score gives a judging panel – and ultimately with the people who are in a position to invest, partner, and otherwise support these young companies – a standardized way of thinking about a company that supplements instincts and directs the conversation to a productive and constructive dialog about the business.

Over the course of two Pitch Slam events in Spain, the quality of comments and questions put forward by the judges and audience was substantive to the company’s position and traction in the market.  Gone were the pot shots and gut feelings that are so often center stage when “experts” sit in public judgment of startups, and along with it the defensiveness that entrepreneurs often project when they’re under the spotlight of such random scrutiny.

In short, the G/Score worked to change the tenor of the dialog and every startup, whether top scoring or newly rising, could take away valuable feedback and constructive advice from the judging panel.

As you might expect, not every company has perfect pitch.  So another key learning from the evening is that entrepreneurs must continually fine-tune their company presentations, and if they tune to the G/Score, we believe they will be communicating more effectively the potential and execution excellence of their companies.

Guidewire Group strives to make the G/Score methodology and criteria transparent so that entrepreneurs understand clearly how they are being assessed.  We provide training videos that describe the score and provide advice on how to present a company for the purpose of being scored. Use these materials to hone your own business presentation, whether you’re pitching for a G/Score or selling your first products.

By tuning into the G/Score, you are stating clearly and as objectively (at least as objectively as a thing as tenuous as a startup can be) what your business is all about, how you will win the market, your commitment to technology and business execution, and the team that will drive your success.

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G/Score: Prescriptive Not Predictive

Posted: by chrisshipley on February 24th, 2010 | No Comments »

Categorized: G/Score, Startups

Over the past month, we’ve been rolling out the G/Score framework with partners, training G/Score assessors, and introducing entrepreneurs to the concept of a standardized, objective, transparent assessment methodology.  The feedback from literally hundreds of conversations has been gratifying and tremendously helpful as we work to make the G/Score a useful and prescriptive tool for entrepreneurs and a valuable vetting mechanism for large organizations seeking to work more effectively with early stage companies.

And then, we got this question on our blog:

“Has the G/Score framework been evaluated against actual outcomes to determine how well it predicts the success/failure of early stage companies?”

When we parse the question, it’s clear that there are really two question on the table:

  1. “Can we use the G/Score to pick winners?” – Where ‘winner’ is a company that will receive venture funding and go on to generate outsized investor returns.
  2. “Can we rely on the G/Score to accurately assess a startup’s strengths and weaknesses?”

Candidly, the answer to the first question is “no.”

But then, that not what the G/Score is meant to do. The G/Score is a measure of a company’s potential and traction at a point in time. While a score might note significant market opportunity and a smart product offering, it is execution over time that drives to a successful outcome.

The G/Score’s seven factors, each rated on a four-point scale, work in combination to articulate a company’s achievement, potential and viability. No factor is weighted more heavily than another in the total scale. That weighting is left largely up to those who incorporate the G/Score into their own evaluations.

For example, a company seeking to acquire a technology may weight delivery of product to market more highly than business model, knowing that upon acquisition the technology will be integrated into the acquirer’s selling and pricing models. A serial startup executive may weight market opportunity most heavily, while looking for low-scoring teams who need the executive’s execution expertise.

By contrast, the answer to the second question is an enthusiastic, though anecdotal, “yes!” The G/Score measures where a company is today, against a clearly articulated ladder of achievement. And our observations of the more than 20,000 companies we’ve interviewed over the last 20 years indicates that if a company scores low and does nothing to address its weaknesses, it will most likely fail. But if a company works to address its weaknesses and improve its score, it dramatically increases its chance of not just surviving, but thriving.

The point is this: the G/Score doesn’t serve as a substitute for your own diligence, instincts or gap-fit analysis. It’s not intended identify a “good chemistry” between startup and investor, partner, or customer. It is, at its core, a uniform filter, a tool, that allows the individuals and organizations that work with startups to do that work more efficiently by helping them to quickly hone in on companies that meet their specific performance criteria.

We describe the G/Score as prescriptive for the entrepreneur because never has it been more clear what a company can do to move the needle on execution.  By clearly articulating the achievement required to score at each level in the four-point scale, the entrepreneur can immediately see the work ahead of him to improve his G/Score and advance his business.

Along the way, the G/Score had another interesting affect on the startup ecosystem. Because it normalizes the way we look at startup businesses and provides a common language to talk about companies, it changes the dialog in the market. Already we’ve found that the conversation between a company and an assessor hones in on issues that matter to the execution and performance of a business. Hard to articulate gut instincts – and worse, feedback as public performance – are replaced by serious questions about business execution and market potential. An entrepreneur’s defensiveness is replaced by desire for constructive feedback. The conversation is qualitatively more useful to everyone.

Every organization working with startups is likely to have a set of guidelines to help them evaluate early stage companies and match them to their specific interests. The G/Score is another tool in that arsenal, one that is open, transparent, and objective, and designed to be as helpful to the entrepreneur as to the company doing the evaluation.

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More info on the G/Score

Posted: by carlacthompson on February 24th, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Categorized: G/Score

Hey folks – just a quick note on the G/Score. Chris and Mike recorded a video walkthrough of the philosophy and methodology behind it, so if you’re looking for more info, this is a great place to start.

And while you’re at it, check out this one too, on optimizing your pitch for a G/Score.

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G/Score: Kampyle

Posted: by carlacthompson on January 8th, 2010 | 11 Comments »

Categorized: G/Score

Welcome to the inaugural G/Score™ post here on The Guidewire. As we mentioned earlier in the week, the G/Score is essentially Guidewire Group’s brain, codified. We’ve taken 20 years and 20,000 startup interviews and molded them into a transparent, quantifiable rating system for young companies. Our scorecards make it easy for startups to identify areas of strength and weakness, and for investors and assessors to establish much-needed evaluation benchmarks.

In time, we hope the G/Score will be adopted by any organization charged with assessing and monitoring startup potential.  For our part, we’ll post scorecards on the companies we meet directly and which we think represent leadership and/or disruption in key market sectors.

As you might imagine, these posted scorecards are merely the tip of the iceberg for the G/Score. We plan to integrate it into many different aspects of our services for startups. We’ll be working with partners around the world, initially through the search for the 100 most promising global startups, to make G/Score the global standard for evaluating the business viability of startups.

But at the simplest level, we want to use it to tell our readers about the companies we’re meeting. So without further ado, you’ll find below an anecdotal summary of Kampyle, a startup working in feedback analytics, and its accompanying scorecard. We’d love to hear your comments, questions, and suggestions on the scorecard’s design, so ping us – info [at] guidewiregroup.com – and let us know what you think.

****************

Kampyle specializes in feedback analytics, giving brands deeper insight into specific behaviors of its users. It is a solid company with a respectable user base, a sharp team, and a well-built product that is needed by virtually every online brand today.

Feedback analytics, however, can be a bit dry; when your stock-in-trade is charts and graphs, you’re not going to be running ads during the Superbowl. Kampyle needs to recognize and adjust, if only slightly, for that fact. Though data is about as hot a topic as one can find in 2010, the company needs a better handle on presenting the large amount of stats it’s throwing at its customers. It’s simply too much for a person to realistically consume.

Beyond that, the company seems to be firing on all cylinders. It has impressive customer wins and partnerships, with a vast potential market ahead of it.  In short, Kampyle transforms numbers into usable, readable, employable analytics – and that’s something today’s major brands will pay a lot for.

**Update – Kampyle has alerted me to a lower-cost package for “startups, non-profits and personal blogs” that includes limited features for $49/month.
See their site for more info.

Kampyle Scorecard January 2010

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Kicking Off 2010 With a Bang

Posted: by carlacthompson on January 4th, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Categorized: Guidewire Group

For nearly two decades, I and my colleagues at Guidewire Group have been evaluating startup companies.  Combined, we estimate that we’ve looked at more than 20,000 startups over the years, trying to pinpoint what bodes well, and what portends a darker future for entrepreneurs creating companies and bringing new innovations to market.

Those many meetings have lead us to a surprisingly narrow set of criteria – seven actually – that prove to be strong indicators of a startup’s prospects and potential.    Over the last year, we’ve codified those criteria into what we now call the G/Score.   The G/Score is a transparent, quantitative assessment methodology designed not just to rate early-stage companies, but also to provide a diagnostic of a company’s strengths and challenges.  The G/Score is prescriptive, providing clear measurement and obvious benchmarks that a young company can aspire to achieve, and in so doing improve the likelihood of its success.

As we embark on the new year, Guidewire Group is launching what may well prove to be our biggest endeavor to date:  encode 20 years and 20,000 interviews into a rich assessment tool that will enable entrepreneurs to evaluate their business concepts, receive directed feedback about their ideas, and get advice to support their business execution. (We’ll be posting our first G/Score scorecard of a company later this week.)

We tested the G/Score concept and methodology throughout 2009 – on entrepreneurs, on large companies that work with startups, on economic and government development agencies charged with catalyzing entrepreneurship. During this process, we found one champion that we’d not quite expected: The National Science Foundation.  The Foundation is charged, through its SBIR program, with supporting tech transfer through entrepreneurship.   Thousands of researchers and entrepreneurs apply for SBIR grants each year and the NSF does an incredible job of providing real support, along with grant money, to validate and commercialize research innovations.

Their challenge, not surprisingly, is scaling their programs in order to provide real guidance and mentorship to the entrepreneurs who receive SBIR grants.

When our champion at  NSF learned about the G/Score, he encouraged us to apply for a grant ourselves, suggesting that we develop an online self-evaluation tool for entrepreneurs that would provide assessment and prescriptive direction for business improvement and acceleration.

Late in 2009, we learned that we’d received the grant to develop proof-of-concept for this self-assessment tool.   As you can imagine, we are thrilled to have the support of the NSF to further the cause of startups and technology innovation in the U.S.

It’s an exciting project, and we’re putting together a crack team of project managers and developers to turn that rich experience into an even richer prototype of the G/Score online.  As we cast our nets to put together the best team and to build the right product, we hope that we can, as always, engage the wonderful community that is the Guidewire Group network, to come along on this exciting ride.

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Kicking Off 2010 With a Bang

Posted: by chrisshipley on January 4th, 2009 | No Comments »

Categorized: Guidewire Group

For nearly two decades, I and my colleagues at Guidewire Group have been evaluating startup companies.  Combined, we estimate that we’ve looked at more than 20,000 startups over the years, trying to pinpoint what bodes well, and what portends a darker future for entrepreneurs creating companies and bringing new innovations to market.

Those many meetings have lead us to a surprisingly narrow set of criteria – seven actually – that prove to be strong indicators of a startup’s prospects and potential.    Over the last year, we’ve codified those criteria into what we now call the G/Score.   The G/Score is a transparent, quantitative assessment methodology designed not just to rate early-stage companies, but also to provide a diagnostic of a company’s strengths and challenges.  The G/Score is prescriptive, providing clear measurement and obvious benchmarks that a young company can aspire to achieve, and in so doing improve the likelihood of its success.

As we embark on the new year, Guidewire Group is launching what may well prove to be our biggest endeavor to date:  encode 20 years and 20,000 interviews into a rich assessment tool that will enable entrepreneurs to evaluate their business concepts, receive directed feedback about their ideas, and get advice to support their business execution. (We’ll be posting our first G/Score scorecard of a company later this week.)

We tested the G/Score concept and methodology throughout 2009 – on entrepreneurs, on large companies that work with startups, on economic and government development agencies charged with catalyzing entrepreneurship. During this process, we found one champion that we’d not quite expected: The National Science Foundation.  The Foundation is charged, through its SBIR program, with supporting tech transfer through entrepreneurship.   Thousands of researchers and entrepreneurs apply for SBIR grants each year and the NSF does an incredible job of providing real support, along with grant money, to validate and commercialize research innovations.

Their challenge, not surprisingly, is scaling their programs in order to provide real guidance and mentorship to the entrepreneurs who receive SBIR grants.

When our champion at  NSF learned about the G/Score, he encouraged us to apply for a grant ourselves, suggesting that we develop an online self-evaluation tool for entrepreneurs that would provide assessment and prescriptive direction for business improvement and acceleration.

Late in 2009, we learned that we’d received the grant to develop proof-of-concept for this self-assessment tool.   As you can imagine, we are thrilled to have the support of the NSF to further the cause of startups and technology innovation in the U.S.

It’s an exciting project, and we’re putting together a crack team of project managers and developers to turn that rich experience into an even richer prototype of the G/Score online.  As we cast our nets to put together the best team and to build the right product, we hope that we can, as always, engage the wonderful community that is the Guidewire Group network, to come along on this exciting ride.

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