A Writing Experience Essay Example For Students

A Writing Experience Essay It is a month prior to the furthest limit of eleventh grade and my English instructor drops a five to six page research paper on the class. The subject of this exploration paper should have been on one of the issues individuals face in America in todays society. At that point, I needed simply to go to the sea shore and be out of school for the mid year. In this manner, I was definitely not excited about this task. Every person in the class was to pick the subject of their examination paper out of a container. Fortunate for me, I was given a subject that was expansive and permitted me to expound on various thoughts. My exploration subject was Homelessness. Individuals frequently have certain perspectives on vagrancy as a result of how or where they are raised. So as to depict a precise report, it was fundamental that I dismiss these off base cases from my report. I expected to look for authentic data or hypotheses that are supported up by insights or individual encounters. This report required a lot of work and consideration. The initial step of the task was to accumulate general plans to turn out to be progressively learned about the theme. I went to the library and accumulated realities from different books managing vagrancy. The books were to some degree accommodating, however they couldn't give me exact measurements because of the way that the books were composed numerous a long time back. Along these lines, I took a gander at articles that were dated as of late so as to get my required data. Now, I had note card after note card of data, yet something was all the while lacking. I expected to associate with my subject on an increasingly close to home level so my paper could be composed with sympathy and feeling. Subsequently, I drove down to Center City, Philadelphia to get a direct thought what destitute life is truly similar to. It took a great deal of guts to stroll over to destitute people and inquire as to whether they would consent to a meeting. Amazingly, a considerable lot of them were more than ready to do as such. I asked them numerous inquiries about their way of life and how they came to be that way. I never acknowledged how kind and appalling vagrants are. Up to that point, I generally accepted that vagrants were all medication addicts that were too lethargic to even think about getting a vocation. These are the terrible and regularly wrong thoughts that are set on society. I understood numerous individuals frequently make a decent attempt to land well-paying positions and make a decent life for themselves. Despite the fact that there are numerous vagrants in America today, the number stays a minority. Along these lines, vagrants are frequently dismissed and not given a reasonable possibility. There was one vagrant that hung out in my brain. I felt such compassion and sympathy for her circumstance. She was getting away from a damaging relationship with her sweetheart and felt she may pass on except if she exposed herself to the avenues. She saw no other way out. This lady had no family to go to. Since she had been in this oppressive relationship for such a long time, she had relied upon him to help her. She left with nothing, trusting he would not follow her down. She had just been destitute for a couple months now and was attempting to better her life. This lady gave me the information to compose my paper with the vital attitude toward vagrancy. This composing experience showed me more than I at any point thought conceivable. It empowered me to value all that I am given throughout everyday life and never to take that for rock. I never up to that point acknowledged that I am so fortunate to be raised in such an adoring and protected condition, liberated from neediness and wrongdoing. I additionally turned out to be progressively mindful of the ways of life in which others live and how extraordinary they are from my own. The experience this composing experience furnished me with will no doubt assist me with collaborating with every single diverse sort of people. .u453816525a0dad4cc54aa70742496d33 , .u453816525a0dad4cc54aa70742496d33 .postImageUrl , .u453816525a0dad4cc54aa70742496d33 .focused content region { min-stature: 80px; position: relative; } .u453816525a0dad4cc54aa70742496d33 , .u453816525a0dad4cc54aa70742496d33:hover , .u453816525a0dad4cc54aa70742496d33:visited , .u453816525a0dad4cc54aa70742496d33:active { border:0!important; } .u453816525a0dad4cc54aa70742496d33 .clearfix:after { content: ; show: table; clear: both; } .u453816525a0dad4cc54aa70742496d33 { show: square; change: foundation shading 250ms; webkit-progress: foundation shading 250ms; width: 100%; darkness: 1; change: mistiness 250ms; webkit-progress: obscurity 250ms; foundation shading: #95A5A6; } .u453816525a0dad4cc54aa70742496d33:active , .u453816525a0dad4cc54aa70742496d33:hover { haziness: 1; change: murkiness 250ms; webkit-progress: murkiness 250ms; foundation shading: #2C3E50; } .u453816525a0dad4cc54aa70742496d33 .focused content zone { width: 100%; position: relative; } .u453816525a0dad4cc54aa70742496d33 .ctaText { fringe base: 0 strong #fff; shading: #2980B9; text dimension: 16px; textual style weight: striking; edge: 0; cushioning: 0; text-improvement: underline; } .u453816525a0dad4cc54aa70742496d33 .postTitle { shading: #FFFFFF; text dimension: 16px; text style weight: 600; edge: 0; cushioning: 0; width: 100%; } .u453816525a0dad4cc54aa70742496d33 .ctaButton { foundation shading: #7F8C8D!important; shading: #2980B9; outskirt: none; fringe range: 3px; box-shadow: none; text dimension: 14px; textual style weight: intense; line-tallness: 26px; moz-fringe span: 3px; text-adjust: focus; text-adornment: none; text-shadow: none; width: 80px; min-tallness: 80px; foundation: url(https://artscolumbia.org/wp-content/modules/intelly-related-posts/resources/pictures/basic arrow.png)no-rehash; position: supreme; right: 0; top: 0; } .u453816525a0dad4cc54aa70742496d33:hover .ctaButton { foundation shading: #34495E!important; } .u453816525a0dad4cc54aa70742496d 33 .focused content { show: table; tallness: 80px; cushioning left: 18px; top: 0; } .u453816525a0dad4cc54aa70742496d33-content { show: table-cell; edge: 0; cushioning: 0; cushioning right: 108px; position: relative; vertical-adjust: center; width: 100%; } .u453816525a0dad4cc54aa70742496d33:after { content: ; show: square; clear: both; } READ: Interpersonal Communication Essay likewise, I presently genuinely comprehend the platitude, Never pass judgment flippantly; assumptions can just make an individual more nave and uninformed to contrasts. 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How to Betray a Friend free essay sample

Everybody has been sold out somehow for the duration of their lives and for the individuals who have encountered treachery, you should realize that It makes a variety of feelings course through your brain. At the point when you are double-crossed you can feel irate, lost and heart-broken, however most exceedingly terrible of all you want to seek retribution. With every one of these emotions bothering in your musings, it is hard to think about an approach to hurt somebody as gravely as they have harmed you.When you are sold out you are in a hopeless state and you truly dont realize what precisely to do to occupy your time. In the event that you can't seek retribution on he individual who hurt you, why not put another person through this damnation? Spread the wretchedness, it isnt reasonable that youre the just one in torment. Sell out a relative, an old companion or make another companion and deceive them Just for amusement only! Regardless of what it's identity is, here is one way th at drives you to leave somebody hurt genuinely for quite a while. We will compose a custom article test on Step by step instructions to Betray a Friend or on the other hand any comparative theme explicitly for you Don't WasteYour Time Recruit WRITER Just 13.90/page 1. SHOW INTEREST Show Interest In something they need and that you have never had Interest In before.You need to need what they need and work to get It before they get It. For instance, a pound that your companion has. Ensure that they see you endeavoring to play with them, hello must know about your activities and witness everything youre doing. The troublesome piece of this is, all through the procedure you should imagine that you are absolutely unconscious that you both are attempting to get the consideration of a similar individual. This may cause them to feel terrible and perhaps ease off, however you yourself ought to have no soul and pull out all the stops! 2. Parade IT ALL Once you get what they needed, (the person/lady.), show them off before your companion. The way in to this progression Is to indeed imagine you are as yet dumbfounded! Make them imagine that you are doing the entirety of this unexpectedly and not the slightest bit are you attempting to hurt sew. Converse with them about their pound and how incredible they are, ensure they are desirous and yet they will feel awful. Sit with their pound and cause your companion to feel awkward around the both of you. 3. Compassion The following stage is to imagine you give it a second thought. Pay heed to the manner in which they act when you raise the subject of their squash, when they in the long run admit how awkward they feel, imagine you had no clue. Reveal to them you are grieved and that on the off chance that they realized else they would have never made any moves in the lead position. Disclose to them that on the off chance that it makes them that awkward you will quit conversing with their pound and proceed onward. . SWEET MISERY At this point your companion will Insist that you dont do anything of that sort, they will say its fine and mention to you to go on with what youre doing.But everyone realizes that when rather you stop and proceed onward, yet you should show no feeling and believe them. Go on with being with their pound and gradually watch your companions feelings destroy them. Your companion most likely has lost all their regard for you and doesnt recognize what to do. They are heart-broken and hopeless, they cannot trust you would hurt them like that. They have now lost an old buddy and a potential sweetheart/girlfriend.They despise you for it and in any event, when things appear to be acceptable outwardly they will never pardon you. Additionally, the best piece of the entirety of this will be this they feel like the entire thing is their issue. So there you have it, youve hurt somebody actually gravely and left them destroyed inside. Presently another person comprehends what it feels like to be deceived and youve left them to spoil with these sentiments of outrage and hopelessness. Possibly your ex-companion will presently take their resentment out on another person and sell out another guiltless individual, Just as you did.

Pleasantville Essay

David and Jennifer lead diverse secondary school public activities. Jennifer is shallow and outgoing. David is thoughtful and invests the vast majority of his energy watching TVs. One night while their mom is away, they battling about the TV. Jennifer needs to watch a show however David needs to watch a long distance race of the Pleasantville. During the battle, the remote control breaks and TV can't be turned on physically. At the point when the baffling TV repairmen appear at tests David about the Pleasantville and gives him a bizarre remote control. David and Jennifer continue battling directly after the repairman leaves, anyway they are some way or another moved into Pleasantville family room. David and Jennifer must imagine they are Bud and Mary Sue, the child and little girl of the show. David reveal to Jennifer they should remain in character and don't disturb the lives of the town, who doesn't have the foggiest idea about any contrast among Bud and Sue to David and Jennifer. David and Jennifer need to fix in the show, however Jennifer doesn’t like lives they has in Pleasantville and David love the jobs he play as Bud. Jennifer was a famous young lady in secondary school, and she never center around school yet her beau. David consistently center around school and the Pleasantville appear. David doesn’t have a lot of response to show like Jennifer. David consistently needed his life as Pleasantville appear. Jennifer obliged her job as Mary Sue however she changes her jobs a bit. Jennifer changes the Pleasantville by having intercourse with her sweetheart that made him shading. Jennifer didn’t assume her job precisely the manner in which she expected to, however David assumes his ideal job as Bud. He obliged the Pleasantville until Jennifer begin changing her job as Mary Sue. She gives them how her lives were as Jennifer not Mary Sue. At the point when individuals beginning become shading, they go nuts; they didn’t realize what was befalling them. Jennifer and David began demonstrating the Pleasantville town individuals about their lives outside of Pleasantville, about how they are shading and things they have outside of town. The finish of Pleasantville, individuals response lost control about individuals and town changes. David began changing individuals feeling in the court, David show them about how feeling feel and once passionate get in them, they begin changing shading and feeling response toward to other people. David and Jennifer response has changes a little from start of the film. David needed assume his jobs as Bud, until he got some answers concerning the progressions with his mom and his chief. David helps his family by demonstrating everyone about the feeling and their lives outside of Pleasantville. David didn’t need his live as Bud, he miss his lives at home with his mom. Jennifer response has change a bit, she didn’t assume her job as Mary Sue. She hasn’t completely changed herself outside of Pleasantville to within the town. Jennifer understands that she like her life as Mary Sue and Pleasantville has changed her to turn out to be better individual. End of the Pleasantville David returned home while Jennifer remain in the town to make an amazing most.

Human Cloning Should be Illegal :: Opposing Perspective Essays

Human Cloning Should be Illegal Would you be able to envision a reality where everybody appeared to be identical and had a similar DNA? This could turn out to be valid because of the advances in science in the field of cloning. We are coming into an age where researchers have begun cloning non-human warm blooded creatures just as fish. Before long, they will need to begin cloning people. Since human cloning is so risky, exploitative, and too costly for regenerative purposes, it ought to be illicit. Human cloning is risky. It is assessed that somewhere in the range of 95 and 98 percent of cloning tests have fizzled (Genetics and Society). These destructions to cloning are as premature deliveries and stillbirths (Genetics and Society). Cloned people likewise risk having serious hereditary variations from the norm. Youngsters cloned from grown-up DNA would, as it were, at that point have â€Å"old† qualities. These children’s fundamental issue would be creating and developing old too rapidly. This incorporates joint inflammation, appearance, and organ work. Since the possibility of having a kid with mental and physical issues is such a great amount of higher than that of an ordinarily imagined kid, cloning ought to be illicit. Human cloning is likewise untrustworthy. Cloning, particularly remedial cloning, requires the utilization of human incipient organisms. Utilizing these undeveloped organisms would mean executing unborn kids. Restorative cloning starts by expelling the undeveloped cells from an incipient organism (Human Cloning). The immature microorganisms are utilized to develop bone, nerve, and muscle tissue. During the time spent remedial cloning, an undeveloped organism, or a child in the beginning times of improvement, is taken and parts of it are developed to create portions of the body including organs and appendages (Human Cloning). Expelling these foundational microorganisms would murder the incipient organism. The undeveloped organism, which would bring about a youngster whenever left in the mother’s belly, is isolated into parts, which are utilized for science. At long last, human cloning for conceptive objects is excessively costly. The expense to clone one human could be more than $100,000 (Herper). That is amazingly high considering the expense of in vitro treatment. In vitro preparation costs somewhere in the range of $3,500 and $25,000 relying upon the strategy (Advanced Fertility Services). In the event that somebody couldn't become pregnant all things considered, they would decided to utilize treatment and be ensured a solid, typical youngster instead of go through the cash to clone a kid that could have deserts. With treatment costing just a single fourth of cloning, for what reason would somebody decide to clone?

BetterWorks

BetterWorks INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are in Palo Alto with BetterWorks. Who are you? And what do you do?Kris: My name is Kris Duggan, I am the CEO and co-founder of BetterWorks. And BetterWorks is enterprise software to help companies set and manage goals and do that at scale. So what that means is if you have a hundred people, if you have a thousand people, if you have ten or fifty thousand people in your company, you would use our software to align and coordinate the entire workforce.Martin: So how did you come up with the idea of BetterWorks?Kris: So I have always been very goal oriented and in many companies that I’ve worked at, I think, we had a very institutionalized disciplined approach to setting goals. And at my last company as CEO it was really important for me to make sure everybody had goals in the company every. It was important that everybody could see everybody’s goals, I wanted to have it very open and collaborative type of approach to working. And I looked for softwa re to actually allow us to do goal setting openly, collaboratively and in kind of a fun and engaging way and I couldn’t find anything and we end up using powerpoint. And so for me, my thinking was: There must be a way to do this better and let me create a company called BetterWorks to do that for companies.Martin: I can imagine that it’s quite hard to align and update it in powerpoint format if you have a bigger company.Kris: Yes, in fact I was speaking with a company recently that has 82,000 knowledge workers. They do goal setting annually today and want to move to a quarterly model but they do 82,000 word documents. And so you can imagine thatâ€" if you don’t have software to facilitate it, automate it, make it easy, make it engaging, it’s going to be very difficult and costly for a large company to go through that process.BUSINESS MODELMartin: Let’s talk about the business model, Kris. What are the type of customer there are currently using BetterWorks, in terms of type of industries and sizes?Kris: So I would say in the beginning we were working with many very high growth, high tech companies here in Silicon Valley. And we’re venture a funded company ourselves, we’re funded by Kleiner Perkins and John Doors on board of directors. So, those were the early kind of customers and that could be like a Lookout Mobile, NerdWallet; companies that have maybe three, four, five hundred people.The company (BetterWorks) now is two years old, we have about 60 people that work in the company, we have an office here Palo Alto and an office in New York and we actually plan to grow to about 150 people next year so we’re going through a high period of growth. And what we found was over the last couple of quarters that we’re not getting a lot of demands from very large enterprises. Many of these are multinationals, some of which are fortune 500 or fortune 1000 kinds companies, headquarter here in North America. But even companies in Europe and globally where they have thousands or ten of thousands of knowledge workers. They have the same problem that you know these high growth companues have, which is how you align the people, how do you coordinate at scale, how do you get people to focus on the right things and how do you do that in a very open and collaborative way so that people can actually see what other people are working on.And interestingly, I think what is driving a lot of growth for our company is that these HR systems, these very traditionally HR systems; Work Days, Success Factors, etc., they are kind of the opposite of open and collaborative; they’re private, nobody can see what other people goals are, it’s not quarterly, its annual and companies are realizing that there must be a better way to do this and they’re coming to us for help.Martin: How did you acquire your first customers, Kris?Kris: So In the early days, it was knocking on doors. At first, rather than selling them BetterWorks, it was more learning how do they do goal selling. And so we talked to many many companies. In fact, I think in my first quarter I talked to almost hundred companies. First of all just to learn, is this a product that we want to build? And is there a market for this product? Because I knew I had the pain with my prior company but I didn’t know anything about HR and performance and goals and software for this area, so I wanted to verify that this was an area that could be commercialized. And by talking to a hundred companies we actually ended up signing ten customers andâ€"Martin: Wow, prior to you developing anything?Kris: Yes, saying, If you have this, we would buy it and if you could work towards getting it deployed we will pay this amount of money. So that what was kind of that the genesis for getting started.One thing that â€"just to add to kinf of my personal experience with this, from a product standpoint what really inspired me wasâ€" at my last company doing the powerpoitn goal setting and it’s bor ing and people hate it and it’s like a painful. And at the same time we were using fitbit in the company and we were doing a fitbit challenge. I saw people using their mobile phone and the app and they’re cheering and they’re taunting each other and some people were walking around the block to get more steps. And I was like how come goal setting in the workplace doesn’t have to be like a Work Day or Success Factor 2.0, if you’re going to reinvent that, it should be much more like fitbit type of experience so that was kind of what inspired the product for us.Martin: And did you go to those one hundred potential clients with mock ups or was it just an idea or some story?Kris: In the early days, it was purely just an idea, like Can you teach me how you’re doing things? And then, as it progressed it was, Can I show you a couple of visual ideas that we have on how we would solve the problem? Then towards the end, we had already started prototyping some real applications. So I think it was a journey over the course of those hundred conversations, because the main thing was that we wanted to make sure that what we developed there was going to be commercial need for it and that we were on the right track.And I think being very interactive and many times I think the customer can’t exactly tell you what the solution should be but they can respond to, How do you feel about this, does this kind of hit the mark? or they say, No actually if it was like this or maybe make these adjustments. So I think it’s always balance between they can’t necessarily express exactly what the outcome should look like but they can give you very quick feedback on if you’re kind of getting close to it.Martin: And out of those 10 potential customers, how much did you actually sign up?Kris: Actually, all 10 of them signed up.Martin: Wow, thats awesome.Kris: Yes, this was two years ago. So now we are working with a couple of hundred customers, many of these are large companies; fortune 500 companies. And we’ve had hundreds of thousands of goals that weve actually used in our system. And users are using this on a daily and weekly basis and we still have that very similar process, which is we have a ton of features that we’re working on right now and we take a very interactive approach where we listen for feedback, we listen for ideas, we go and do some designs and rapid prototyping and then we take those features back to a certain type of user, maybe the executive user or a manager or an individual or maybe even and an administrator of the system and get their feedback on, Are we hitting the right mark?Martin: When we look at the revenue model, Kris, how did you come up with a pricing point?Kris: So our price point is $15 per user per month and then we had some volume discounts as the volume goes up.I guess the way that we looked at it was the value of doing goals in a very efficient, modern, open, collaborative and frequent way. We feel like if you’ re spending a $100,000 a year on an employee or spending $180 a year to make sure they’re working on the right things, that are focused and engaged and they had a sense of purpose and they understand how their work relates to the big picture, we think that there is tremendous value for the customer to take advantage of that.The second thing is we looked at comparative business models of other similar technologies and we saw for example that Work Day which is that a HR system doesn’t do the kind of collaborative goal settings like we do but it’s the kind of in the general area, kind of market that we’re in. And the price point for Work Days is typically $25-40 per users per month. And so for us to say it’s only an incremental investment of $15 for going really deep in this one highly valuable area for the company, it seemed like that was a very compelling kind of price point for our product.Martin: Is there the ability to cancel the contract monthly or is it like an annual basis?Kris: In English you would say month to month.At BetterWorks, most of our agreements are an annual contract, but actually many of our customers are signing multi-year contracts. And they view this as like, this isn’t an optional thing, they have to do goals, they want to be disciplined in this area but they don’t want to use PowerPoint or Word or Excel or very traditional HR systems to do that and so they’re looking at actually deploying this company wide for thousands of users and not just as a test, but actually like, This is how we want to run the company.Martin: Are you providing, besides the software, also some kind of training?Kris: Yeah, we call that customer success and so for customer success we have a whole team there where and these are people from a consulting background, change management or business transformation background. So we had people from Deloitte, we have people from Microsoft Yammer and other areas where they are helping the customer work with th e executive team to take advantage of the technology and working with the managers in the companies to take advantage and working with the program leader to drive the communication around how to roll out what is happening and then looking at best practices, or how to optimize their usage of the system. So, we absolutely invest in this for our larger client.Martin: And in terms of combination of marketing and sales are you only doing direct sales or are you also doing marketing?Kris: I would say that our business model today is mostly direct model. But I could see over time that we’re going to start to build that channel partners and that could be through other boutique services type of company, it could be the large kind of big consulting firms looking at bundling in this capability into some of their chain management practice. And I could see a whole host of complementary technology partners in the HR space where I could see us bundling into those platforms as well.Martin: Cool. You shortly elaborated on a Work Day but in general when you look at the industry what is your competitive advantage?Kris: Yes, I would say quite confidently that we have the best goals product on the planet. Literally. That’s because that is all we do, we love goals. And we spent two years working on it and we’ve completely reinvented how goals can be open, collaborative and where progress can be recorded as you’re actually making progress on your goal, you can support other people’s goals by aligning your goals with them, you can have multiple conributors aligning to goals. It’s basically the deepest goals product on the planet.And what I would say is our long term competitive differentiationâ€"it’s actually in a couple of areas:The number one, we are very focused on engagement and how do you drive engagement around goals. So that means what we measure every day is our daily active usage, our weekly active usage and our monthly active usage to ensure that people are we aving this into how they actually work. And this is a new thing for goal setting. Typically if you have these HR systems, you might interact with your goals once or twice per year and now we’re getting people on average to do that several times per month. So that’s kind of a more than a 10x behavior change in engagement in a very traditional workflow like goals.The second thing I would say is that we are really focused on how do you make goal settingâ€" the process as smart as possible and using even techniques like data science and becoming more data driven to connect goals that appear related, to get recommendations around goals, to basically get as smart as you can around leveraging these data signals. And that has never been done before in this whole field.And the third thing that totally new is connecting all of those different systems of records like Sales Force like Jira or Slack or whatever your day to day system are, connecting that directly to your goals so that you do n’t even have to check in. I just closed the deal with this customer, if Sales Force automatically does that for you then you automatically get credit. Or I just shift this feature in JIRA and then it automatically publishes at BetterWorks.So these are the three major areas that are completely kind of new in the field of goals is engagement, then data science, and then integration.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM KRIS DUGGAN In Palo Alto (CA), we meet CEO and Co-Founder of BetterWorks, Kris Duggan. Kris talks about his story how he came up with the idea and founded BetterWorks, how the current business model works, as well as he provides some advice for young entrepreneurs.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are in Palo Alto with BetterWorks. Who are you? And what do you do?Kris: My name is Kris Duggan, I am the CEO and co-founder of BetterWorks. And BetterWorks is enterprise software to help companies set and manage goals and do that at scale. So what that means is if you have a hundred people, if you have a thousand people, if you have ten or fifty thousand people in your company, you would use our software to align and coordinate the entire workforce.Martin: So how did you come up with the idea of BetterWorks?Kris: So I have always been very goal oriented and in many companies that I’ve worked at, I think, we had a very institutionalized disciplined approach to setting goals. And at my last company as CEO it was really important for me to make sure everybody had goals in the company every. It was important that everybody could see everybody’s goals, I wanted to have it very open and collaborative type of approach to working. And I looked for software to actually allow us to do goal setting openly, collaboratively and in kind of a fun and engaging way and I couldn’t find anything and we end up using powerpoint. And so for me, my thinking was: There must be a way to do this better and let me create a company called BetterWorks to do that for companies.Martin: I can imagine that it’s quite hard to align and update it in powerpoint format if you have a bigger company.Kris: Yes, in fact I was speaking with a company recently that has 82,000 knowledge workers. They do goal setting annually today and want to move to a quarterly model but they do 82,000 word documents. And so you can imagine thatâ€" if you don’t have software to facilitate it, automate it, make it easy, make it e ngaging, it’s going to be very difficult and costly for a large company to go through that process.BUSINESS MODELMartin: Let’s talk about the business model, Kris. What are the type of customer there are currently using BetterWorks, in terms of type of industries and sizes?Kris: So I would say in the beginning we were working with many very high growth, high tech companies here in Silicon Valley. And we’re venture a funded company ourselves, we’re funded by Kleiner Perkins and John Doors on board of directors. So, those were the early kind of customers and that could be like a Lookout Mobile, NerdWallet; companies that have maybe three, four, five hundred people.The company (BetterWorks) now is two years old, we have about 60 people that work in the company, we have an office here Palo Alto and an office in New York and we actually plan to grow to about 150 people next year so we’re going through a high period of growth. And what we found was over the last couple of quarte rs that we’re not getting a lot of demands from very large enterprises. Many of these are multinationals, some of which are fortune 500 or fortune 1000 kinds companies, headquarter here in North America. But even companies in Europe and globally where they have thousands or ten of thousands of knowledge workers. They have the same problem that you know these high growth companues have, which is how you align the people, how do you coordinate at scale, how do you get people to focus on the right things and how do you do that in a very open and collaborative way so that people can actually see what other people are working on.And interestingly, I think what is driving a lot of growth for our company is that these HR systems, these very traditionally HR systems; Work Days, Success Factors, etc., they are kind of the opposite of open and collaborative; they’re private, nobody can see what other people goals are, it’s not quarterly, its annual and companies are realizing that there must be a better way to do this and they’re coming to us for help.Martin: How did you acquire your first customers, Kris?Kris: So In the early days, it was knocking on doors. At first, rather than selling them BetterWorks, it was more learning how do they do goal selling. And so we talked to many many companies. In fact, I think in my first quarter I talked to almost hundred companies. First of all just to learn, is this a product that we want to build? And is there a market for this product? Because I knew I had the pain with my prior company but I didn’t know anything about HR and performance and goals and software for this area, so I wanted to verify that this was an area that could be commercialized. And by talking to a hundred companies we actually ended up signing ten customers andâ€"Martin: Wow, prior to you developing anything?Kris: Yes, saying, If you have this, we would buy it and if you could work towards getting it deployed we will pay this amount of money. So that what was kind of that the genesis for getting started.One thing that â€"just to add to kinf of my personal experience with this, from a product standpoint what really inspired me wasâ€" at my last company doing the powerpoitn goal setting and it’s boring and people hate it and it’s like a painful. And at the same time we were using fitbit in the company and we were doing a fitbit challenge. I saw people using their mobile phone and the app and they’re cheering and they’re taunting each other and some people were walking around the block to get more steps. And I was like how come goal setting in the workplace doesn’t have to be like a Work Day or Success Factor 2.0, if you’re going to reinvent that, it should be much more like fitbit type of experience so that was kind of what inspired the product for us.Martin: And did you go to those one hundred potential clients with mock ups or was it just an idea or some story?Kris: In the early days, it was purely just an idea, like Can you teach me how you’re doing things? And then, as it progressed it was, Can I show you a couple of visual ideas that we have on how we would solve the problem? Then towards the end, we had already started prototyping some real applications. So I think it was a journey over the course of those hundred conversations, because the main thing was that we wanted to make sure that what we developed there was going to be commercial need for it and that we were on the right track.And I think being very interactive and many times I think the customer can’t exactly tell you what the solution should be but they can respond to, How do you feel about this, does this kind of hit the mark? or they say, No actually if it was like this or maybe make these adjustments. So I think it’s always balance between they can’t necessarily express exactly what the outcome should look like but they can give you very quick feedback on if you’re kind of getting close to it.Martin: And out of those 10 potential customers, how much did you actually sign up?Kris: Actually, all 10 of them signed up.Martin: Wow, thats awesome.Kris: Yes, this was two years ago. So now we are working with a couple of hundred customers, many of these are large companies; fortune 500 companies. And we’ve had hundreds of thousands of goals that weve actually used in our system. And users are using this on a daily and weekly basis and we still have that very similar process, which is we have a ton of features that we’re working on right now and we take a very interactive approach where we listen for feedback, we listen for ideas, we go and do some designs and rapid prototyping and then we take those features back to a certain type of user, maybe the executive user or a manager or an individual or maybe even and an administrator of the system and get their feedback on, Are we hitting the right mark?Martin: When we look at the revenue model, Kris, how did you come up with a pricing point?Kris: So our price point is $15 per user per month and then we had some volume discounts as the volume goes up.I guess the way that we looked at it was the value of doing goals in a very efficient, modern, open, collaborative and frequent way. We feel like if you’re spending a $100,000 a year on an employee or spending $180 a year to make sure they’re working on the right things, that are focused and engaged and they had a sense of purpose and they understand how their work relates to the big picture, we think that there is tremendous value for the customer to take advantage of that.The second thing is we looked at comparative business models of other similar technologies and we saw for example that Work Day which is that a HR system doesn’t do the kind of collaborative goal settings like we do but it’s the kind of in the general area, kind of market that we’re in. And the price point for Work Days is typically $25-40 per users per month. And so for us to say it’s only an incremental investment of $15 for going really deep in this one highly valuable area for the company, it seemed like that was a very compelling kind of price point for our product.Martin: Is there the ability to cancel the contract monthly or is it like an annual basis?Kris: In English you would say month to month.At BetterWorks, most of our agreements are an annual contract, but actually many of our customers are signing multi-year contracts. And they view this as like, this isn’t an optional thing, they have to do goals, they want to be disciplined in this area but they don’t want to use PowerPoint or Word or Excel or very traditional HR systems to do that and so they’re looking at actually deploying this company wide for thousands of users and not just as a test, but actually like, This is how we want to run the company.Martin: Are you providing, besides the software, also some kind of training?Kris: Yeah, we call that customer success and so for customer success we have a whole team there where and these are people from a consulting background, change management or business transformation background. So we had people from Deloitte, we have people from Microsoft Yammer and other areas where they are helping the customer work with the executive team to take advantage of the technology and working with the managers in the companies to take advantage and working with the program leader to drive the communication around how to roll out what is happening and then looking at best practices, or how to optimize their usage of the system. So, we absolutely invest in this for our larger client.Martin: And in terms of combination of marketing and sales are you only doing direct sales or are you also doing marketing?Kris: I would say that our business model today is mostly direct model. But I could see over time that we’re going to start to build that channel partners and that could be through other boutique services type of company, it could be the large kind of big cons ulting firms looking at bundling in this capability into some of their chain management practice. And I could see a whole host of complementary technology partners in the HR space where I could see us bundling into those platforms as well.Martin: Cool. You shortly elaborated on a Work Day but in general when you look at the industry what is your competitive advantage?Kris: Yes, I would say quite confidently that we have the best goals product on the planet. Literally. That’s because that is all we do, we love goals. And we spent two years working on it and we’ve completely reinvented how goals can be open, collaborative and where progress can be recorded as you’re actually making progress on your goal, you can support other people’s goals by aligning your goals with them, you can have multiple conributors aligning to goals. It’s basically the deepest goals product on the planet.And what I would say is our long term competitive differentiationâ€"it’s actually in a couple of areas:The number one, we are very focused on engagement and how do you drive engagement around goals. So that means what we measure every day is our daily active usage, our weekly active usage and our monthly active usage to ensure that people are weaving this into how they actually work. And this is a new thing for goal setting. Typically if you have these HR systems, you might interact with your goals once or twice per year and now we’re getting people on average to do that several times per month. So that’s kind of a more than a 10x behavior change in engagement in a very traditional workflow like goals.The second thing I would say is that we are really focused on how do you make goal settingâ€" the process as smart as possible and using even techniques like data science and becoming more data driven to connect goals that appear related, to get recommendations around goals, to basically get as smart as you can around leveraging these data signals. And that has never been d one before in this whole field.And the third thing that totally new is connecting all of those different systems of records like Sales Force like Jira or Slack or whatever your day to day system are, connecting that directly to your goals so that you don’t even have to check in. I just closed the deal with this customer, if Sales Force automatically does that for you then you automatically get credit. Or I just shift this feature in JIRA and then it automatically publishes at BetterWorks.So these are the three major areas that are completely kind of new in the field of goals is engagement, then data science, and then integration.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM KRIS DUGGANMartin: Great Kris, imagine a friend of yours comes to you and says, Hey Kris, I want to start with a company. What advice would you give him?Kris: Lots of advice I guess. I guess starting with, you better be pretty passionate about the topic that you’re going to be focused on because you’re probably going to be working on it for five or ten years. So that’s a pretty long commitment, so that’s number one.Number two I think is, solve a problem that you’re intimately familiar with. So is this something that you read about it or is this something that you’ve actually personally experienced? Because I think the best ideas are the ones that come from this personal, kind of empathy and experience around the problem. Very similar to kind of like, I was trying to do this exact same thing at my last company and the software that we created is the software that I wish that I had in my last company.Martin: Be your own customer.Kris: Yes. And hopefully, there’s a market for that and then other people will start to get excited about it. But if you aren’t passionate and you haven’t personally experienced it, I think those are going be very very challenging things.Probably the third piece of advice would be validate idea with as many as people as possible. And there’s a difference here bec ause I see a lot of entrepeneurs that will tell you their idea or tell the people their idea but they’re not really listening for the right queues and they’re telling you everything but they’re not saying, If I had this would you buy it and how much would you pay?’ And On a scale of one to ten how valuable will this be? On a scale of one to ten how much of a priority will this take inside your company? They’re not listening for the right signals to kind of verify their idea they’re more kind of telling you their concepts.Martin: They’re not even asking because it sounds more to me like they’re saying somethingKris: Yes, they’re not listening and they’re not asking. So, being an entrepreneur does not mean being stuck on this one idea and trying to tell as many people as possible. I think being entrepreneur isâ€" to me its kind of like you start pulling out a thread on a sweater And the thread could be it was really difficult to do goal setting, at least for me. L et me see if other people are experiencing thatI think in the case we were fortunate that the original vision for the idea and then ultimately kind of how it came about were quite similar. But it could have actually been that, it turns out that it was this some certain aspect of the idea was totally terrible part of it, but another totally unrelated thing was actually the real discovery. And I’ve see that many many times now, like some of the startups that I’ve worked with is that your original assumptionsâ€"If you start with, ‘it’s going to be this, it’s going look like it’s going to have these features and we’re going to sell this’ versus ‘I’ve got this thread, I want to pull on this thread some more. It seems like people are having a problem with XY and Z, let me brainstorn some various ideas on how to solve that and talk to people and listen’, then you’re going to accelerate your learning and probably realize the answer more quickly and more accurately.Ma rtin: Totally Agree. Thank you so much, Kris, for your time!Kris: Okay.Martin: And next time when you think about starting a company, just listen and validate your assumptions. Maybe you’ll learn faster where to stop or where to invest more. Thank you so much. Great, thank you.Kris: Alright. Good.