Always Be Innovating: Thinking Like a Startup

#sxsw #SxInnovate

Every startup raves about innovation, but how does it work within a large company? As technology changes and consumer demand shifts, it’s vital for companies big and small to question and re-evaluate their strategies. Adopting the startup mentality is key and pretending to be a “lean startup” isn’t always enough. While some have created internal research and development teams, others have acquired companies or been acquired themselves, while continuing to work independently. Whether you’re a big brand or a startup that has momentum but is not yet mainstream, how do you keep the wheels of innovation turning without cannibalizing your money-making product? EasilyDo, Grail and Tagged executives will provide an in-depth look at how to inject originality and novelty into your company, regardless of its size. You’ll hear about the pros and cons of acquiring innovation versus creating a labs team and stories of hackathon style overnight experiments that turned into huge wins.

Presenters

Greg Tseng

Co-Founder & CEO

Tagged

Greg Tseng co-founded Tagged, the world’s leading social discovery company, in 2004 and has served as CEO since its inception. Greg is responsible for driving Tagged forward, growing its flagship product to serve a global user base of more than 330 million registered users in 220 countries around the world. Under Greg’s leadership, Tagged became profitable in 2008, has made numerous successful acquisitions, and facilitates over 100 million new social connections every month.

Hetal Pandya

Co-Founder

Easilydo

Hetal Pandya Co-Founder of EasilyDo. She is committed to building mobile applications and solutions to help simplify life. She comes from a family of woman entrepreneurs and has 15+ years of experience building and promoting mobile products. She founded EasilyDo to enable consumers to be able to use their smartphones to actually do smart things for them. She spends most of her time searching for ways to save time in what we all take to be mundane everyday tasks. Most recently, she ran the Mobile Care Product and Marketing Division at Nuance Communications where she built a $30+M revenue mobile care product portfolio from concept. She has also built many thought leading mobile applications and solutions at Microsoft (Tellme Networks) and Nortel Networks. She holds a MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas, Dallas and MBA from Duke University. In her spare time, she loves to spend time with her daughter programming robots and gets great satisfaction from brainstorming, mentoring and advising women entrepreneurs. Hetal has spoken before at SXSW, Women 2.0 and panels at other tech conferences.

Mike Isaac

Sr Editor

Re/Code

Ryan Magnussen

Founder CEO

Grail Inc

Ryan Magnussen is the Founder and CEO of Grail, the world's first social app for just articles & videos. Grail built a state of the art technology platform that ingests analyzes, organizes, surfaces and recommends millions of pieces of articles and videos monthly. Grail holds 11 provisional and 2 utility patents in the field of semiotics.

In 1995 he founded Zentropy Partners, which grew to become the fifth-largest interactive advertising agency in the United States with annual revenues of over $80 million. By the time Magnussen sold Zentropy to Interpublic in 1999, the company had ten offices operating in six countries.

In 2003, Magnussen founded Ripe Digital and raised over $50 million from Time Warner and Hearst to build short-form, on-demand TV channels that were distributed simultaneously over the Internet, cable VOD and mobile devices. By 2006, Ripe Digital had amassed one of the largest short form content libraries in the world and was broadcasting three networks to over 100 million screens.