Martin Luther King and Malcolm X free essay sample

Social Justice and Civil Equality In the quest for social equity and social liberties, Martin Luther King Jr. , Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael, tried to revise a defective framework. To achieve this errand, these men entered the arsenal and decided to employ peacefulness as their weapon. Their objective: to battle brutality with peacefulness, to battle detest with affection, and to spread uniformity through harmony. At long last they succeeded. Brutality breeds viciousness, despise breeds abhor, it is an inadequate methodology and an ancient intend to settling social orders issues. Malcolm X and Carmichael were both outrageous people yet that doesn't make them vicious. They assaulted social equity and social equality enthusiastically and confidently, not viciously. The strategies utilized and contentions made by Martin Luther King Jr. in Letter from Birmingham Jail, Malcolm X in The Ballot or the Bullet, and Stokely Carmichael in Black Power, exhibit the intensity of peacefulness. These men address three separate issues in every one of their works. Lord examines social issues with respect to the country in general in his letter. Malcolm X addresses the political equity of dark people in African American people group. Carmichael talks about racial domination and its mistreatment of African American residents in their own locale. Battling with harmony, fighting with peacefulness, is the best measure while seeking after social equity and social equality. I will show how Martin Luther King Jr. , Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael utilized latent techniques and peaceful methods in overcoming the issues they had nearby. Martin Luther King Jr. was a promoter of peacefulness, an advocate of harmony, and sought after social judges in the social equality period legitimately and peacefully. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail and through his endless walks and talks, he had the option to show how peacefulness can be utilized to battle the social shameful acts occurring all through the country. Martin Luther King Jr. composed the Letter from Birmingham Jail on April sixteenth, 1963. This correspondence shows Kings adherence to peacefulness and his confidence in its capacity to defeat isolation. Ruler contends that latently â€Å"waiting† and respectful â€Å"patience† can never again be acknowledged in the quick quest for social equity and social equality. Lord calls for direct peaceful activity by the African American people group. He uses his whereabouts, his composing style, and his explanation behind composing the letter to give his supporters instances of peacefulness. Ruler was a splendid individual and I accept the title of this letter was picked which is as it should be. Naming this Letter from Birmingham Jail, King removes any proactive meanings or forceful messages that could be gotten from a title. Peaceful direct activity is Kings point. There is no call for brutal activity in the wake of being captured, no call for savage fights in his name. He is currently simply one more man sitting in prison composing a letter to the majority. Ruler titles his letter from a spot, not to an individual or to network of individuals. His crowd is without a doubt the African American people group and by advising them he is composing â€Å"from jail† he attests his need and need for peaceful direct activity by exhibiting he won't â€Å"stand inactively by† and â€Å"wait patiently† for things to change. He is in prison for his direct peaceful activity and he is attempting to engrain this way of thinking into the psyches of the dark network with this title. The setting of a demonstration or occasion can be nearly as significant as the episode itself. Ruler comprehended this idea and utilized it for his potential benefit. Letter from Birmingham Jail supported King and his peaceful way to deal with social shameful acts and social equality. Lord uses his style of composing as a powerful strategy for upholding peacefulness. He composes and talks in a capably latent voice that is helpful in assaulting isolation straightforwardly and peacefully. Lord states, â€Å"I trust, sirs, you can comprehend our authentic and unavoidable restlessness. † The expression â€Å"our authentic and unavoidable impatience† can be translated to show King’s aloof forceful, yet direct way when managing peacefulness. By expressing the African American people group â€Å"impatience† as real and unavoidable King compels those perusing to turn out to be quickly and straightforwardly worried about issues of social equity and social equality. Ruler at that point states, â€Å"My companions, I should state to you that we have not made a solitary addition in social liberties without decided lawful and peaceful weight. † Again there is a forcefulness with which the words are perused. The expression â€Å"determined lawful and peaceful pressure,† sticks out. Linguistically, â€Å"determined,† â€Å"legal,† and â€Å"nonviolent† are descriptive words that apply to â€Å"pressure†. Each of the three of those words are equal with peacefulness. I think King needed â€Å"determined† to offer want to his supporters. He needs them to be â€Å"determined† in their peaceful push for correspondence. â€Å"Legal† and â€Å"nonviolent† go connected at the hip here. Any vicious activity is without a doubt illicit. By coupling brutality with lawlessness, King can press upon his devotees that, to stay inside the laws of the United States, their journey for common uniformity must be a peaceful one. Ruler utilizes these words to show how peacefulness is the â€Å"legal† or right technique, not brutality, to utilize when moving toward social liberties. â€Å"Pressure† isn’t power, forcing somebody doesn't guarantee the deed will be finished. Weight takes into consideration different alternatives yet pushes the one being â€Å"pressured† into a corner. That is King needs. He needs to corner white America, cover them with peaceful direct activity so the African American people group may conquer the social treacheries of the time. Ruler utilizes his style of writing in a way that passes on a quiet, peaceful disposition while staying powerful and direct with social issues nearby. Each letter has its point, its fundamental thought, its main explanation behind setting aside the effort to put down considerations into sentences, and afterward setting aside more effort to mail those musings some place. Ruler composes this letter as a reaction to â€Å"several white ministry who had called King’s activities ‘untimely’. † Kings type of â€Å"utimely† activity lies in peaceful fights. In this circumstance the pastors beseech that the African American people group â€Å"wait† and be â€Å"patient. † King can no longer acknowledge this; he can never again be sidelined by the court framework that has crushed to stop concerning social liberties. He should make direct move. He affirms that the issue here should fall with the â€Å"horrific authentic and contemporary setting that incited them† as opposed to the peaceful exhibits that occurred. I accept this strategy for thought shows his peaceful mindset. He needs to dissuade these ministers, he needs to agree with them, shake hands and concur that this isolation must end. Ruler states, â€Å"It is appalling that exhibitions are occurring in Birmingham, however it is much progressively deplorable that the city’s white force structure left the Negro people group with no other option. † Two expressions stick out, â€Å"demonstrations† and â€Å"no elective. † King could have considered his showing a dissent, however to regularly is the term fight related with savagery. Ruler needed his immediate activity to show a quiet, peaceful manner. He likewise expresses that the city of Birmingham left him â€Å"no elective. † I accept no choice to show Kings dissatisfaction with the white framework set up in Birmingham. It additionally permits him to advocate his â€Å"direct action† technique for moving toward peacefulness. By not having some other methods for showing their hatred for the social framework, King had the option to act legitimately and peacefully as this exhibit. It is this bombing social force structure that King plans to fix and correct peacefully. All through the Letter from Birmingham Jail, King had the option to build up his peaceful message utilizing his present area, his composing style, and the point that he was expounding on. Ruler assaulted isolation in this letter with capably inactive tones and depictive wording which so anyone might hear him to adequately advocate peacefulness. His proactive, peaceful interpretation of isolation disposed of the â€Å"wait patiently† idea that had been ingrained in the African American people group. Lord had the option to utilize compelling contentions and techniques to address the social â€Å"injustices† occurring in the United States in peaceful way. Malcolm X conveyed his Ballot or the Bullet discourse in 1964 at a Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio. Despite the fact that there are vicious implications all through this work, I accept there is a progressively crucial peaceful message that Malcolm X was attempting to pass on. He accepts that the social liberties development should be â€Å"common struggle† for each African American. Utilizing his title, composing style and subject of conversation I will show how even Malcolm X, America’s miscreant during the Civil Rights time, was a promoter of peacefulness in the quest for social equity and social liberties. The Ballot or the Bullet is a provocative; some may state vicious title, that takes into consideration no hazy situation. I, nonetheless, accept this to show Malcolm X’s desire to move quickly toward the social equality circumstance within reach. On many occasions in this location he calls to his kindred African Americans to educate themselves to the â€Å"ballot† or political environment of their locale. Instead of savagery, Malcolm X accepts â€Å"that the individual of color should control the legislative issues and the government officials in his own community†. He needs his individual dark residents to better th

Prejudice In Canada Essays - Discrimination, Abuse,

Preference In Canada The subject of my position paper should be a great many people in Canada are not preferential towards minority gatherings yet I discover it basically difficult to contend this on the grounds that ordinary I witness numerous events of biased conduct. My course book expressed that most preference is found in individuals who have little instruction or originated from lower-pay families, yet this announcement doesn't appear to be valid. The papers I read, and things individuals around me state and do show that partiality is near and likely consistently will be. The individuals who have been considered preferential on the grounds that they are from lower-salary families or have little instruction have been raised to battle for themselves. Hence, they may consider workers a danger, and accept they remove employments and cash from whites. Likewise, because of their absence of training they may not know that numerous workers start organizations of their own and utilize numerous whites in this way making more employments. Tragically, it isn't simply individuals in this gathering are preferential. The paper is a key bit of media that is frequently partial, you simply need to figure out the real story to understand this bias. Just yesterday I was flipping through the Toronto Star and a specific feature gotten my attention - Parents of killed kid express their Jewish displeasure and I pondered internally, their Jewish outrage? I didn't know that Jewish individuals had an alternate sort of outrage than some other ethnic gathering. Preference is additionally surrounding me regularly. I hear words like paki, chink, wop, Jew knave and nigger hourly when around companions and schoolmates. These racial slurs are tossed around without an idea of the genuine importance of them. Tragically guardians don't appear to have brought up their kids to instinctually realize that utilizing these slurs is totally unseemly and wrong. The most significant job a parent can play in their youngsters' life is that of a good example, yet numerous guardians, rich and poor, talk or carry on with partiality normally. Most youngsters grow up to have a significant number of indistinguishable ethics and convictions from their folks, in this way this chain of preference will probably never end. I wish I could state that a great many people in Canada are not preferential towards minority gatherings however I dread this fair I Humanism

Social Media Academic Essay

English 1020 October 31 2011 Menial Media: Employees Waste Hours of Time on the Internet Many individuals concur that long range informal communication in the work environment is simply requesting calamity and loss of efficiency. Having various sorts of informal organizations in the work environment could likewise prompt awkward circumstances between collaborators that could be terrible for business. In any case, some differ and accept that these locales can unite collaborators. In addition to the fact that they believe it would unite collaborators, they likewise state this could expand business due to the ‘family-like' style that the given office has.Although this might be valid now and again, considers show that most of the time, long range interpersonal communication is one of the ruins of an organization due to sites, for example, Wiki Links, Facebook and Twitter that cause unsettling influences in the work environment and may even reason a portion of the organization's pri vate data to be spilled. Since informal communication destinations are such an interruption and cause time to be detracted from efficiency, they ought to be prohibited from the working environment for representatives. Bringing long range interpersonal communication into the working environment is once in a while hazardous for one who is applying to get a job.Employers can explore future possibilities and see what their online life resembles. Albeit an individual will be unable to be totally seen exclusively by their person to person communication site, a business may pass judgment on them dependent on it. For instance, had somebody had an image of themselves labeled online for the general population to see, a business may consider that awful exposure for the organization and choose not to employ this individual. Be that as it may, the individuals who go after positions have choices to set their records on private and person to person communication organizations are not considered li able for the material posted. When joining either MySpace or Facebook [or Twitter], the client must consent to the terms of administration and to the Web locales protection policies† (Elzweig and Peeples â€Å"Using Social†). In the event that anything pessimistic occurs in the line of an individual not being recruited for a vocation because of a person to person communication site, that site won't be considered responsible. In a couple of cases this accomplishes work out to the advantage of the applier. â€Å"A CareerBuilder study of in excess of 2,500 managers, discharged in August of this current year, demonstrated 35 percent of respondents utilize internet based life to advance their companies†(Hunt â€Å"Finders Keepers†).This implies that there are unlimited open doors for individuals to secure positions on ads of person to person communication locales. Be that as it may, an organization can likewise utilize these locales to see past occupations and duties and determine the status of their experience. Once more, this is beneficial for certain individuals, however for other people, it is a bad dream experiencing their systems administration site and clear up their data. It is foolish for organizations to intrude in issues that don't concern them. Up to a representative is carrying out his responsibility right, at that point managers should mind their own.Employers who utilize long range interpersonal communication locales to ‘check up' or ‘review' their representatives are not being kind to the individual existences of their laborers. Assuming, maybe, an applier has made it past the phase of being handpicked and chosen through the out of line methods for long range interpersonal communication, he ought not be permitted to get to his own systems administration site during work hours. This is a significant interruption that could cause long periods of work and profitability to be put off so representatives can refresh statuses, tweet, and browse individual messages. Most business laborers confess to going through in any event one hour of their work time on a person to person communication site.Should organizations be answerable for paying representatives during the current hour of spare time? Just 10% of business permit their laborers to be on interpersonal interaction destinations at whatever point they please (Schiller â€Å"Employers Crack†). Some contend that these destinations are essentially ‘mind boosts' for workers. In any case, numerous others make a considerably progressively admirable statement that in the event that a laborer truly required a ‘mind boost', at that point he ought to go on a brief stroll outside: less efficiency lost, and substantially more solid. Informal communication destinations cause an excessive amount of interruption in the work environment and ought not be allowed.If the interruption of checking the site a couple of times each day isn't suffic ient, at that point think about cyberfights. Representatives upsetting each other over these destinations is asking for catastrophe. Displeased representatives lead to a despondent working environment, so why permit the chance of that to occur? Indeed, one might say that these interpersonal organizations could prompt a ‘family-like condition', anyway the opportunities for the last is significantly more plausible. Collaborators contradicting every others' very own lives is a significant danger to the soundness of the work environment and might prompt a worker being terminated or suspended.Embarrassing, puerile, and dishonorable contentions occur over the web each day. One legal advisor speaks,†I needn't bother with the world knowing each time I say something [. . . ] there's a great deal that you can do to change your settings† (Schaffer â€Å"Online Networking†). What might prevent these contentions from occurring between associates in a work environment? In any event, ‘friending' associates is a potential issue, particularly if the administrator of the record doesn't care for work or doesn't care for the individuals at work and overlooks the way that they have been ‘friends'.This word related peril could without much of a stretch be kept away from by not permitting person to person communication destinations in the working environment. Interpersonal organizations are intended for ones individual life; work isn't ones individual life, so one shouldn't blend the two. It is somewhat of a hazy area for a great many people since they don't know whether they should include colleagues onto their locales or not. Laborers should work during work time and play during play time. The two ought to never be blended. It is basically amateurish to have a Facebook page up while at a work desk.There is an opportune time for everything, and the perfect time for person to person communication and imparting is for save time , not working. Long range informal communication destinations sit around and assets for the organization. â€Å"If one worker invests one hour of organization energy in Facebook regular, it conceivably costs their boss more than $6,200 per year† (â€Å"Facebook Costs†). This time spent playing on long range informal communication locales is losing organizations cash, organizations are in an ideal situation simply releasing representatives home an hour ahead of schedule without pay while restricting interpersonal interaction destinations, than permitting laborers to squander this money.Another peril of permitting individual lives to conflict with work lives, is the material that is posted. It is an excessive amount of vitality to ensure that the manager can't see when, â€Å"Called in wiped out to work-Fishing Day! † is posted as a status. This could end a present vocation. Once, I worked in a dress store where a young lady phoned in wiped out, just to post on twitter a couple of h ours after the fact that she and her companions were having a sleepover. This appears to be quite innocuous, and despite the fact that I couldn't have cared less, my manager was very upset.She left a notice on the board the following day saying that if individuals were not going to be keen about what they posted on their long range interpersonal communication locales, at that point they would be terminated. It is likewise a serious issue to ensure that no unflattering pictures that shouldn't be seen by a chief, are not seen. â€Å"If a candidate or representative exhibits an absence of watchfulness and judgment by posting spring break photographs showing oneself obviously inebriated on a [social networking] page, a business who finds these photographs online may consider the photographs when choosing [. . . ] to hold the employee† (Baker â€Å"How Far†).Some state that individuals who are this thoughtless ought to be terminated in any case, however a great many people are totally absent minded of who they have acknowledged as their Facebook companion and in some cases simply don't think before they post. This situation could be totally maintained a strategic distance from if work and web based life were not blended. The ‘Basic Information' segment on long range interpersonal communication destinations is a factor that could destroy numerous connections at work. At work, associates presumably don't have the foggiest idea about the whole foundation detail of huge numbers of their partners. Simple research could prompt inappropriate preferences against others.Social organizing locales are taken outside of any relevant connection to the issue at hand when they are brought to the work place. That isn't what they were intended for. Critical colleagues may peruse a kindred laborers data and naturally choose not to like them due to the data put. The rushed speculation that is brought about by these kinds of locales are negative since it is difficul t to become acquainted with somebody except if time has been gone through with them. Long range interpersonal communication destinations take into account the ‘time spent' factor to be removed and hurried speculation on character to be set up. Despite the fact that the advantages of systems administration are self-evident, the way toward meeting new individuals, setting up customary contact and building significant connections, is reliably challenging† (Crappell â€Å"Preparing for Professional†). These destinations make it simpler to stay away from eye to eye discussion with an individual, and simply expect that an individual is actually similar to their online profile. Coincidentally speaking terrible about a ‘friended' associate on an informal communication site may be one of the most shocking things a specialist could do, except if this laborer was speaking awful about his boss.This isn't considered digital battles or digital tormenting on the grounds th at it was absolutely a mishap, and the slandered about partner realizes that. For instance, posting on Facebook that the man in the work area to the correct scents awful is anything but a smart thought; particularly because of the face that he is exhausted and on Facebook also. He sees this and doesn't need encounter, so he picks the other option: The Silent Treatment. Person to person communication locales cause developed grown-ups to act like kids. Individuals contend this can be forestalled by essentially paying attention.That, notwithstanding, doesn't factor in the way that individuals overlook names each day and could

The End Of World War I Essays - French Third Republic,

The End of World War I At the point when World War I finished on November 11, 1918, harmony talks went on for quite a long time because of the Allied pioneers needing to rebuff the foe and ?separating the riches of war.? A conventional consent to end the war was made and called the Treaty of Versailles. The issue that took the most time were the regional issues in light of the fact that the realms of Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman, and Germany had crumpled. These fallen realms must be split and America's President Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau of France, Vittorio Orlando of Italy, and David Lloyd George of Great Britain, were the principle deciders of this arrangement. During 1918, Russia was taken out of the war because of military routs and the Bolshevik Revolution. Despite the fact that Russia had not been some portion of the Central Powers, Germany held onto quite a bit of western Russia. After numerous long periods of belligerence, the four men had made western Russia into the countries of Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland. The Treaty of Versailles was either an arrangement of harmony or a retaliation for the Germans. In April of 1919, Germany was already caught and made to hold up in a little house that was encircled with security fencing. The Allied, who caught Germany, needed to make a harmony bargain to end the battling. The Germans concurred, yet they needed an arrangement that depended on the Fourteen Points yet clearly they were not going to get it due to the manner in which they were dealt with; the spiked metal was superfluous and ?ought to have warned them to what lay ahead.? At the point when the bargain was first acquainted with the Germans, they declined to sign it. It constrained the Germans to acknowledge full obligation regarding the war and strip themselves of its states, coal fields, and the regions of Alsace and Lorraine. It likewise made them pay crazy reparations to the Allies. In any case, on June 28, 1919, the Germans hesitantly marked the arrangement in light of the fact that the Allies wouldn't transform one word. Out of the $33 billion dollars the Germans needed to pay for harms, the nation was just ready to pay $4.5 billion of it. The provisions of the Treaty of Versailles helped set up for a whole new world war under 20 years after the fact in light of the fact that the Allied needed to prevent Germany from consistently turning out to be imperialistic again and still have them pay the war reparations. Germany contradicted these activities and was the most affected by the particulars of the Versailles Treaty. Germany got the unpolished finish of the war and was edgy to locate another pioneer to get out of their downturn. That pioneer was Adolf Hitler. World War I was won by the Allied in which a conventional understanding was made called the Versailles Treaty. It both acquired harmony and war the coming years. Because of the cruel ways of life it constrained Germany to live, World War II broke out inside twenty years time from the settlement.

Usability of a Principles of Marketing Course in the Field of Essay

Ease of use of a Principles of Marketing Course in the Field of Information Technology Project Management - Essay Example Understanding the connection between the two fields in this way includes examination of their extensions for intermingling. The extent of data innovation includes use of innovation in arrangement and the board of data for auspicious and effective correspondence to clients of such data. Such a degree includes investigation of business frameworks, structures, and advancement of answers for correspondence activities. Data innovation likewise includes readiness of calendars and undertaking records, databases, reports and assessments (Churchill and Lacobucci, 2009). The extent of a standard of showcasing course in this way offers data for relevance of data innovation. It for example includes reviews and examination of systems, for example, value, circulation, limited time ideas, and consumers’ reaction to advertising activities. Every one of these viewpoints are quantifiable in numeric information that requires data innovation for proficient account, investigation and correspondence (Churchill and Lacobucci, 2009). Subsequently, a standard of promoting course is pertinent in the field of data innovation in light of the fact that the extent of advertising bargains in information that is dealt with and overseen by data innovation

ClearSlide

ClearSlide INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are in San Francisco in the ClearSlide office. Hi, Al, who are you and what do you do?Al: So I am Al. I am the co-founder of ClearSlide and I am an entrepreneur, a lifelong entrepreneur.Martin: Cool!Martin: Tell me about what is your background? What did you do before you started ClearSlide and what is ClearSlide by the way?Al: So I have been an entrepreneur all my life. I came out here to San Francisco in 97 and right out of the school I started the company. So I started Evite which is an online invitation product, it was popular in the days. And really since that I have started a number of companies, ClearSlide being the most recent. so I have never really worked for a company that I didn’t start myself.Martin: What is the connector between those different companies?Al: I think for me; I am excited about companies where using technology to communicate with people. There is a lot of technology that is just for technology sake so a faster hard drive or just to make the technology better. But I am very passionate with connecting to people and the way that you can use technology to tell their story and communicate with your friends, your colleagues what have you. That is something I see as very valuable and it is a thing I can get passionate about.So Evite was about getting connected with your friends offline and create parties, and ClearSlide is about communicating with your customers but in both cases it is people that are connecting and talking together.Martin: When did you have this “Aha” moment “Ok, I want to start ClearSlide”?Al: It was funny actually. So I started with Jim, my co-founder and we had worked together at Evite so we had known each other for about fifteen years. And we started with a different idea actually. We were selling something to advertisers, a media product and we found it very hard to tell our story with these media advertisers. You call them up and they say, “You have 5 minutes to pitch me. That’s it.” They give you very little time, it is kind of very competitive market. And we found that nothing, no technology let us tell the story the way that we wanted to or that was really compelling and so we initially created ClearSlide for our own use. A way to tell our story and we started using it with customers and we found that they were more interested in the way we were presenting. They don’t like actually our product but they ask, “What is that? What did you just use? That was kind of interesting.” And that happened two or three times in a row and we said, “Ok, what is this?”What we discovered was in the space of sales sales communication a lot of work could be done around the back office of storing data by your customers but not actually making that conversation better. And so we decided to shift gears and focus on that.I found too that most of the times the best startups are things you want to use yourself and a need that you discover that if you want t o use it and be the customer of your product you can really understand and be passionate about it. Same with Evite, the same with ClearSlide as well, it was something that we needed.Martin: Did you change the name from your old idea to the new?Al: We did. It was ShieldMedia before. We changed that very quickly to ClearSlide.Martin: And did you have some other investors in before?Al: No, no. So we have been working and it was early so three or four months in and we just started to get the product going so we actually didn’t get that investors in yet.Martin: And then what was the next three or six months looking like?Al: That was just very interesting. We had this ShieldMedia product and we had ClearSlide and it was important for Jim and I to really prove that there were customers willing to buy ClearSlide. So, I have been involved in business before where it seemed like a promise but there was not actually anyone that really wanted to pay you. We set ourselves a goal to find 5 peop le willing to give us money. So this was our goal and Jim arranged some conversations with customers and we went to pitch 5 customers in one day. What we did is we call them up and said, “Hey, here is our product. We are going to be doing a Beta in about a month but if you are interested we need a credit card right now.” And we had 5 out of 5, 100 percent in 24 hours.We didn’t have anyone to put the credit cards so we were just writing them down on paper. But we proved ourselves that there were people willing to put money behind this. And so for the next three to six months we just worked on building the product and talking to customers and just Jim and myself. I have been involved in business before where we raised money pretty early. But we really wanted to prove to ourselves that we can get customers that want to pay for it. I was just us working away for about nine months before we raised any money and by then we really had customers and we had enough revenue we could run profitably actually and then we said, “Hey, this is really the time to scale the business.”Martin: Imagine, I was one of those 5 potential clients. You are pitching to me and you need to convince me that I should not wait like for six months or nine months when you have your really good product ready but I should buy it now.Al: Part of that was to say a couple of things.One was to say, “Listen, we are looking for people to help guide the product and we are looking for feedback from you. Your feedback is going to be instrumental for what we build”and that is interesting for them because they can early be able to guide it.The other thing was kind of a ticking clock when we said, “I need that right now and we are only going to be about ten slots in this beta program and so I need a decision right away”. And that urgency drew up a lot in as well.Martin: So this really mean well in the next two hours or one or two-week time?Al: In that initial point it was on the call. Jim di d most of these pitches and it was basically a full pitch. We had a prototype to show, we walk through the product, walk through our vision because we are trying to do but if you wanted I need it (the answer) now. It worked.Martin: So you had 5 potential customers. What was the next step?Al: We had credit cards and we spent the next month or two building the product so we built it an early, early version and we said to those first customers “Hey, it is available, just to get you in” And In the early days we focused on person to person training, so we call them up and say, “Hey let me get you into the product. Let me show you how it works.” And we spent with each individual user to show them how it works which is time consuming but you also can hear what is working and what is not working, what they need and what they don’t need. That created a lot off product feedback early. We just did that over and over and over again.So in the first couple of months we probably spoke to hundreds of customers just Jim and just the two of us. Hundreds of companies and hundreds if not thousands of users and just over and over again you get them into the product and get them to use the credit card and you learn quickly what they are really reacting on.I think the other issue, sometimes entrepreneurs have a product, but that willingness to pay means that they (customers) actually value. Sometimes people say, “I like it, it sounds good” but then they actually pay you and so asking for the money early you are able to kind of really gauge what they really value, what they see as interesting. So yes, we were just doing that over and over again.Martin: How did you find the first customers and made them sure?Al: Early on we knew that these are sales teams and so we were thinking “Hey, who do we know that are head of sales?” Fortunately, in our previous history we were connected to some folks that were head of sales. And sometimes it was the folks in our network, in J ames network particularly. But other times it was just cold calling. It was just identifying someone who we knew would be a good prospect and just reaching out.Martin: At what point of time did you say, “Ok, maybe we should raise some external funding”?Al: It was interesting. So about nine to ten months in we have hired our first employees. We initially thought we have the budget for one, but we were really stretching to hire two. It was well on my first few sales wraps. And we spent a few months and Jim really trained them and we could develop the product or work with them and once we found that they were also having success, meaning that we were able to reproduce the success we had then we were like “Wow, this Is working. We just need to add more people to it.” And at that point we said, “Hey we should raise. We had something repeatable, scalable that resonate with customers. Let’s raise some money behind it”.Martin: And how long did the fundraising process take you? Al: It probably took about two days, a couple of days.Martin: Two days!Al: Partially though there is a lot of preparation that goes into it. So, first of all it is everything you have done for the company but also those two days were all about researching the best people to talk to, having connections. There are a couple of weeks of preparation before it, so make sure you are talking to the right people and have the right messaging and everything is kind of really tight. And then really in our first or second meeting, where was I and Aydin (our seed investor9, and it was about a five minutes in and he said, “I want to invest. I want to lead this round” And I said, We haven’t even shown you what we do yet,” and he was like “I have seen enough.”At that point we said, “Wow, somebody is really excited”. We met a few other people that were great investors but didn’t really click as quickly as Aydin did and so he let a round and we met with a couple of other people. SO i t was only a couple of days.Martin: I would have assumed that it was more similar to the sales experience in the first place So you got the two days.Al: That is right! I have found that when raising money,it is important to have a tight window because investors want to see momentum so it is helpful to keep it really fast.BUSINESS MODEL OF CLEARSLIDEMartin: Al, let’s talk about the business model of ClearSlide. What are the typical customer segments that you are targeting and what is exactly the value proposition that you are delivering to them?Al: We target sales and marketing teams primarily in enterprise companies. So anything from a couple of sales reps to a thousand of sales reps, for example Comcast. Generally, the verticals are any enterprise team, but we are heavy in media and technology but also in healthcare and financial services, kind of traditional enterprise teams.The value proposition is basically to make you more productive. We are there to help in your conversation s with your customers, to make those go better but also to give you insights to what happened both for the sales rep and for the sales leadership to understand: Is my message working? Is my approach working? Can I improve things or as a company could we have better messaging to improve things? So we spent a long time on insights and analytics to drive better results behind the scenes as well.Martin: So does that mean that you are integrating with other kind of sales funnel management tools? Or is it that you are providing the sales on a management level as well?Al: We are doing it with CRM primarily which keeps the data from your customers. But we found that we really take over ones the sales rep starts to work with an account. So early in the funnel you have marketing tools that are targeting the customer figuring who the right customer is but they haven’t actually started the conversation. So once the conversation starts we can take over.Martin: Good, and can you also describe w hat the ClearSlide product looks like?Al: In the product is a few main features or functions.One is around speaking to a customer and that is called live pitch and you can use it over the phone and in person. We have both web technology and mobile technology so when you communicate you can use all your collateral power points or PDFs, your video files and present it to the customer.We also have e-mail pitch which is for sending content collateral. So after meeting I might send you a deck. And what I do is I send you a link and you will be able to visit it in a web browser or on your mobile device. When you do I get insights that you opened it and you spent time on slides, what was most interesting to you.Those are really the two key interaction methods either in-person or over the phone or e-mail. But there is also a whole suite on analytics and insights where you can understand both is the customer interested but also you can roll that data to the sales team. So you can say which c ontent is working best, which sales reps are being the most productive. We are actually working on predicting type technology where based on all the data we have we can predict which deals are likely to close or not close so we can help leadership understand what is really happening and be able to manage to coach the team.Martin: Al, how is the revenue model working?Al: So that is one of the great things, at ClearSlide we use SaaS in general. It is a very simple model. It is basically per user. It is a subscription model so enterprise SaaS model where we charge per user per year such type pricing. And it depends on various things with the different packages with pricing but it basically scales up based on the size of your team.Martin: Is it really like on a per year basis or on a per month basis?Al: When we quote a customer we will say on a monthly basis, here is your cost per month. but generally, most of our contracts have an annual commitment or multiyear commitment. When we star ted actually in the early days we were more month to month as we started to get the business growing, but at this point it is mostly annual or multiyear commitment.Martin: Can you give us some insights in the organization? What is the typically the functional split so to speak of the people working here?Al: In ClearSlide, two biggest teams are sales and technology. Our sales teams are spread across three offices in the US â€" here, New York and Seattle. We are thinking about international offices as well. We are both inside sellers which sell over the phone and field sellers which sell in person so it is really based on the size of the deal. If it is a larger deal it really makes more sense to meet in person. If it is smaller, we can settle it over the phone.And then on the technology side we have a lots of development talent, operational talent, IT. Because our product is pretty broad into the technology we offer we do both mobile web, we do analytics and insights, we also do conve rsion and we do gmail plug ins, our plug ins. There is a lot of technology behind the stack, there is lots of different types of developers and technology people in the company. That was all wrapped into our technology team.At that point those two teams are roughly similar in size. So I’d say 40 percent of the company is in the sales and 40 percent is in the technology engineer teams and then about 20 percent is in our support functions.Martin: You seem to have a lot of experience in terms of sales. What are the most important ingredients for a great sales pitch to really close it?Al: To close it?Martin: For real in two minutes or five minutes.Al: I think the biggest thing is to show value. A lot of times people will show the product and show features but it is really important to show the value that you provide to that person. What we often have found is that sometimes sales folks start to a cookie kind of approach and they don’t modify or the type of person they are selling to . If you are talking to VP of sales or CMO or head of finance or CEO those are all very different roles and those roles care about different things. As you begin to customize your approach based on who you are pitching to and the kinds of challenges that they are facing.For a VP of sales rather than talking about e-mail pitch you might talk about how the challenges in scaling a team, how you are hiring the right people, or if you have one sales rep that is productive how do you replicate that across other sales reps. Those are the challenges, those are the things he deals with every day. And so we start with those and show benefits against those and then show the value, then show the actual product behind that as well. But you have to get really emotionally connected to the challenge or the problem that you are trying to face. And so that is probably one of the biggest insights.I think simplicity is key. If you are able to pitch it in two minutes or three minutes and have it be effe ctive than that’s where you get to start. You can always make it longer if they want to dig in but you will have to be able to sink the idea in the early days.Martin: So currently the story of ClearSlide sounds to me like very straightforward. Any roadblocks along the way that you needed to shift around?Al: I think one of the challenging things for us was trying to figure out the right customer segment and how we sell to it along the way. In the early days we were selling to teams of five or ten or twenty and now we found success at 1000 or 2000. And the way you sell to a thousand-person team is very different than the way you sell to a small team.And so one thing that is challenging about the business it has been the breath of customer base and to sell over the phone SMB (small mid size business) it is a lot of different skills and a type of organizational approach and the selling approach is very different along the way. So we were kind of fine tuning that and it has been chall enging.I think there are always people along the way as you grow. Initially as an entrepreneur you try to get that product fit. Once you get that then it really becomes about scaling the people organization and it is really about building the best teams, getting the right people. There are always times when it works or it doesn’t work as you grow and as you grow quickly those things can be challenging at points. I think those two are probably the biggest ones.Martin: Can you elaborate on how are you currently acquiring or doing the sales for larger customers or the smaller customers?Al: How are we breaking in?Martin: Yes, because you said that your sales approach is different between those two segments.Al: The biggest thing when you sell to small companies is the users, the sales reps and the decision maker are very close. They might sit in the same office. It might be a small company of 10 people and there might be 10 reps using the product and their manager is right there and ha s a credit card. And it is a more simplified approach or a faster approach. It can be more driven by the users using the product.In a large company, there may be many levels in between the user and the budget owner. What that means is that you have to sell on multiple levels and you have to be able to get users using it but also get a senior leader understand the budget reasons for doing it and the risks and the rewards and the benefits to that level. So what we have found is it is a sale where you have to at multiple levels and do bottoms up selling and also top down selling where you want to break in high and go low or go low and break in high. If you do those both well everyone up and down the chain is a supporter.We have had situations where we don’t do that well, where maybe the users like the product but the leader doesn’t know why it is valuable or vice versa the leader likes the product but the users don’t know why it is valuable. And that will create friction because you don’t get buy in across the organization. A lot of times the approach needs to have a multiple layer approach for to work effectively.Martin: Imagine, you identified the budget owner and you are pitching him so that you convince him. At some point having this really in parallel for me It is quite hard because you first need to get it into their hands and if the budget owns says, “Yes, now you can do it, then you have some kind of staging: signed off by the budget owner, pushing through all the organization, penetrating the users, and making sure that they are using it. And then have this kind of dual track approach. Or do you see this in another way?Al: It hopefully starts that way. If you start high and go down is also a great place to start. The problem can be if you can’t get the attention initially and maybe after starting low you can get attention high.The other thing we found is even if you get the decision makers initially excited we have seen a lot of buyer approac h these days where they are very collaborative and even though the leader might like it they really want to see that their team has adopted it and likes it: So, I am interested, but you have to prove to me that my team will use it and use it well and I am going to see value from it.”So we often do these trials or pilots program to say let’s get a hundred users using the product and will report back up both back up to the user but also what is the value. Here is some deals we have closed with ClearSlide, this is the value that we drove. And once you meet that you really need everyone on board and those leaders will be looking for feedback from their teams in terms of how effective it was.Martin: What is the typical time of having such a trial period because for you showing some tracktion and usage?Al: It varies. It can be anywhere for smaller companies it can be a couple of weeks and for larger companies it can be a couple of months I’d say. And then showing the value really de pends on sales cycles. Sometimes they will sell very quickly in which case you have got short deals, in other cases the sales take longer so you can show pipeline. Here is the customers that have been moving the pipeline and here is how we have generated a value.Martin: Then basically you are doing an A/B test, so here is how you performed before and now look at the sales pattern and the closing rate and so after using our tool it is like that. So here is the value.Al: Exactly. We show the team how they used to sell or that team and some other teams. What has been great is once you have sales that have gone through the process then they know the value of ClearSlide. So sometimes at that point they just buy it because it has been proven to them. But if you try to show credibility then these are some of the steps that we go through.Martin: And are you seeing a lot of recommendations or referrals because if you are like you said targeting some sales department of company A and some of the sales reps is leaving the company, taking this experience to another company and then having something like inbound sales?Al: Absolutely. One that is specific for sales is they are tend to be very word of mouth driven and they very much get credibility value what the other co-workers use or what the other colleagues use or have used in the past. We have very often seen that work very effectively. Actually our program is here to track when users leave companies and where they go so we can then sell to the new company as well. We find that to be very effective.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM AL LIEB In San Francisco (CA), we meet Co-Founder Board Member of ClearSlide, Al Lieb. Al talks about how ClearSlide was founded, how the current business model works, as well as he provides some advice for young entrepreneurs.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are in San Francisco in the ClearSlide office. Hi, Al, who are you and what do you do?Al: So I am Al. I am the co-founder of ClearSlide and I am an entrepreneur, a lifelong entrepreneur.Martin: Cool!Martin: Tell me about what is your background? What did you do before you started ClearSlide and what is ClearSlide by the way?Al: So I have been an entrepreneur all my life. I came out here to San Francisco in 97 and right out of the school I started the company. So I started Evite which is an online invitation product, it was popular in the days. And really since that I have started a number of companies, ClearSlide being the most recent. so I have never really worked for a company that I didn’t start myself.Martin: What is the connecto r between those different companies?Al: I think for me; I am excited about companies where using technology to communicate with people. There is a lot of technology that is just for technology sake so a faster hard drive or just to make the technology better. But I am very passionate with connecting to people and the way that you can use technology to tell their story and communicate with your friends, your colleagues what have you. That is something I see as very valuable and it is a thing I can get passionate about.So Evite was about getting connected with your friends offline and create parties, and ClearSlide is about communicating with your customers but in both cases it is people that are connecting and talking together.Martin: When did you have this “Aha” moment “Ok, I want to start ClearSlide”?Al: It was funny actually. So I started with Jim, my co-founder and we had worked together at Evite so we had known each other for about fifteen years. And we started with a di fferent idea actually. We were selling something to advertisers, a media product and we found it very hard to tell our story with these media advertisers. You call them up and they say, “You have 5 minutes to pitch me. That’s it.” They give you very little time, it is kind of very competitive market. And we found that nothing, no technology let us tell the story the way that we wanted to or that was really compelling and so we initially created ClearSlide for our own use. A way to tell our story and we started using it with customers and we found that they were more interested in the way we were presenting. They don’t like actually our product but they ask, “What is that? What did you just use? That was kind of interesting.” And that happened two or three times in a row and we said, “Ok, what is this?”What we discovered was in the space of sales sales communication a lot of work could be done around the back office of storing data by your customers but not actually making that conversation better. And so we decided to shift gears and focus on that.I found too that most of the times the best startups are things you want to use yourself and a need that you discover that if you want to use it and be the customer of your product you can really understand and be passionate about it. Same with Evite, the same with ClearSlide as well, it was something that we needed.Martin: Did you change the name from your old idea to the new?Al: We did. It was ShieldMedia before. We changed that very quickly to ClearSlide.Martin: And did you have some other investors in before?Al: No, no. So we have been working and it was early so three or four months in and we just started to get the product going so we actually didn’t get that investors in yet.Martin: And then what was the next three or six months looking like?Al: That was just very interesting. We had this ShieldMedia product and we had ClearSlide and it was important for Jim and I to really prove that there were customers willing to buy ClearSlide. So, I have been involved in business before where it seemed like a promise but there was not actually anyone that really wanted to pay you. We set ourselves a goal to find 5 people willing to give us money. So this was our goal and Jim arranged some conversations with customers and we went to pitch 5 customers in one day. What we did is we call them up and said, “Hey, here is our product. We are going to be doing a Beta in about a month but if you are interested we need a credit card right now.” And we had 5 out of 5, 100 percent in 24 hours.We didn’t have anyone to put the credit cards so we were just writing them down on paper. But we proved ourselves that there were people willing to put money behind this. And so for the next three to six months we just worked on building the product and talking to customers and just Jim and myself. I have been involved in business before where we raised money pretty early. But we really wanted to p rove to ourselves that we can get customers that want to pay for it. I was just us working away for about nine months before we raised any money and by then we really had customers and we had enough revenue we could run profitably actually and then we said, “Hey, this is really the time to scale the business.”Martin: Imagine, I was one of those 5 potential clients. You are pitching to me and you need to convince me that I should not wait like for six months or nine months when you have your really good product ready but I should buy it now.Al: Part of that was to say a couple of things.One was to say, “Listen, we are looking for people to help guide the product and we are looking for feedback from you. Your feedback is going to be instrumental for what we build”and that is interesting for them because they can early be able to guide it.The other thing was kind of a ticking clock when we said, “I need that right now and we are only going to be about ten slots in this beta p rogram and so I need a decision right away”. And that urgency drew up a lot in as well.Martin: So this really mean well in the next two hours or one or two-week time?Al: In that initial point it was on the call. Jim did most of these pitches and it was basically a full pitch. We had a prototype to show, we walk through the product, walk through our vision because we are trying to do but if you wanted I need it (the answer) now. It worked.Martin: So you had 5 potential customers. What was the next step?Al: We had credit cards and we spent the next month or two building the product so we built it an early, early version and we said to those first customers “Hey, it is available, just to get you in” And In the early days we focused on person to person training, so we call them up and say, “Hey let me get you into the product. Let me show you how it works.” And we spent with each individual user to show them how it works which is time consuming but you also can hear what is wo rking and what is not working, what they need and what they don’t need. That created a lot off product feedback early. We just did that over and over and over again.So in the first couple of months we probably spoke to hundreds of customers just Jim and just the two of us. Hundreds of companies and hundreds if not thousands of users and just over and over again you get them into the product and get them to use the credit card and you learn quickly what they are really reacting on.I think the other issue, sometimes entrepreneurs have a product, but that willingness to pay means that they (customers) actually value. Sometimes people say, “I like it, it sounds good” but then they actually pay you and so asking for the money early you are able to kind of really gauge what they really value, what they see as interesting. So yes, we were just doing that over and over again.Martin: How did you find the first customers and made them sure?Al: Early on we knew that these are sales teams and so we were thinking “Hey, who do we know that are head of sales?” Fortunately, in our previous history we were connected to some folks that were head of sales. And sometimes it was the folks in our network, in James network particularly. But other times it was just cold calling. It was just identifying someone who we knew would be a good prospect and just reaching out.Martin: At what point of time did you say, “Ok, maybe we should raise some external funding”?Al: It was interesting. So about nine to ten months in we have hired our first employees. We initially thought we have the budget for one, but we were really stretching to hire two. It was well on my first few sales wraps. And we spent a few months and Jim really trained them and we could develop the product or work with them and once we found that they were also having success, meaning that we were able to reproduce the success we had then we were like “Wow, this Is working. We just need to add more people to it .” And at that point we said, “Hey we should raise. We had something repeatable, scalable that resonate with customers. Let’s raise some money behind it”.Martin: And how long did the fundraising process take you?Al: It probably took about two days, a couple of days.Martin: Two days!Al: Partially though there is a lot of preparation that goes into it. So, first of all it is everything you have done for the company but also those two days were all about researching the best people to talk to, having connections. There are a couple of weeks of preparation before it, so make sure you are talking to the right people and have the right messaging and everything is kind of really tight. And then really in our first or second meeting, where was I and Aydin (our seed investor9, and it was about a five minutes in and he said, “I want to invest. I want to lead this round” And I said, We haven’t even shown you what we do yet,” and he was like “I have seen enough.”At that poin t we said, “Wow, somebody is really excited”. We met a few other people that were great investors but didn’t really click as quickly as Aydin did and so he let a round and we met with a couple of other people. SO it was only a couple of days.Martin: I would have assumed that it was more similar to the sales experience in the first place So you got the two days.Al: That is right! I have found that when raising money,it is important to have a tight window because investors want to see momentum so it is helpful to keep it really fast.BUSINESS MODEL OF CLEARSLIDEMartin: Al, let’s talk about the business model of ClearSlide. What are the typical customer segments that you are targeting and what is exactly the value proposition that you are delivering to them?Al: We target sales and marketing teams primarily in enterprise companies. So anything from a couple of sales reps to a thousand of sales reps, for example Comcast. Generally, the verticals are any enterprise team, but we are heavy in media and technology but also in healthcare and financial services, kind of traditional enterprise teams.The value proposition is basically to make you more productive. We are there to help in your conversations with your customers, to make those go better but also to give you insights to what happened both for the sales rep and for the sales leadership to understand: Is my message working? Is my approach working? Can I improve things or as a company could we have better messaging to improve things? So we spent a long time on insights and analytics to drive better results behind the scenes as well.Martin: So does that mean that you are integrating with other kind of sales funnel management tools? Or is it that you are providing the sales on a management level as well?Al: We are doing it with CRM primarily which keeps the data from your customers. But we found that we really take over ones the sales rep starts to work with an account. So early in the funnel you have marketi ng tools that are targeting the customer figuring who the right customer is but they haven’t actually started the conversation. So once the conversation starts we can take over.Martin: Good, and can you also describe what the ClearSlide product looks like?Al: In the product is a few main features or functions.One is around speaking to a customer and that is called live pitch and you can use it over the phone and in person. We have both web technology and mobile technology so when you communicate you can use all your collateral power points or PDFs, your video files and present it to the customer.We also have e-mail pitch which is for sending content collateral. So after meeting I might send you a deck. And what I do is I send you a link and you will be able to visit it in a web browser or on your mobile device. When you do I get insights that you opened it and you spent time on slides, what was most interesting to you.Those are really the two key interaction methods either in-pers on or over the phone or e-mail. But there is also a whole suite on analytics and insights where you can understand both is the customer interested but also you can roll that data to the sales team. So you can say which content is working best, which sales reps are being the most productive. We are actually working on predicting type technology where based on all the data we have we can predict which deals are likely to close or not close so we can help leadership understand what is really happening and be able to manage to coach the team.Martin: Al, how is the revenue model working?Al: So that is one of the great things, at ClearSlide we use SaaS in general. It is a very simple model. It is basically per user. It is a subscription model so enterprise SaaS model where we charge per user per year such type pricing. And it depends on various things with the different packages with pricing but it basically scales up based on the size of your team.Martin: Is it really like on a per year basis or on a per month basis?Al: When we quote a customer we will say on a monthly basis, here is your cost per month. but generally, most of our contracts have an annual commitment or multiyear commitment. When we started actually in the early days we were more month to month as we started to get the business growing, but at this point it is mostly annual or multiyear commitment.Martin: Can you give us some insights in the organization? What is the typically the functional split so to speak of the people working here?Al: In ClearSlide, two biggest teams are sales and technology. Our sales teams are spread across three offices in the US â€" here, New York and Seattle. We are thinking about international offices as well. We are both inside sellers which sell over the phone and field sellers which sell in person so it is really based on the size of the deal. If it is a larger deal it really makes more sense to meet in person. If it is smaller, we can settle it over the phone.And then on the technology side we have a lots of development talent, operational talent, IT. Because our product is pretty broad into the technology we offer we do both mobile web, we do analytics and insights, we also do conversion and we do gmail plug ins, our plug ins. There is a lot of technology behind the stack, there is lots of different types of developers and technology people in the company. That was all wrapped into our technology team.At that point those two teams are roughly similar in size. So I’d say 40 percent of the company is in the sales and 40 percent is in the technology engineer teams and then about 20 percent is in our support functions.Martin: You seem to have a lot of experience in terms of sales. What are the most important ingredients for a great sales pitch to really close it?Al: To close it?Martin: For real in two minutes or five minutes.Al: I think the biggest thing is to show value. A lot of times people will show the product and show features but it is rea lly important to show the value that you provide to that person. What we often have found is that sometimes sales folks start to a cookie kind of approach and they don’t modify or the type of person they are selling to. If you are talking to VP of sales or CMO or head of finance or CEO those are all very different roles and those roles care about different things. As you begin to customize your approach based on who you are pitching to and the kinds of challenges that they are facing.For a VP of sales rather than talking about e-mail pitch you might talk about how the challenges in scaling a team, how you are hiring the right people, or if you have one sales rep that is productive how do you replicate that across other sales reps. Those are the challenges, those are the things he deals with every day. And so we start with those and show benefits against those and then show the value, then show the actual product behind that as well. But you have to get really emotionally connected to the challenge or the problem that you are trying to face. And so that is probably one of the biggest insights.I think simplicity is key. If you are able to pitch it in two minutes or three minutes and have it be effective than that’s where you get to start. You can always make it longer if they want to dig in but you will have to be able to sink the idea in the early days.Martin: So currently the story of ClearSlide sounds to me like very straightforward. Any roadblocks along the way that you needed to shift around?Al: I think one of the challenging things for us was trying to figure out the right customer segment and how we sell to it along the way. In the early days we were selling to teams of five or ten or twenty and now we found success at 1000 or 2000. And the way you sell to a thousand-person team is very different than the way you sell to a small team.And so one thing that is challenging about the business it has been the breath of customer base and to sell over the ph one SMB (small mid size business) it is a lot of different skills and a type of organizational approach and the selling approach is very different along the way. So we were kind of fine tuning that and it has been challenging.I think there are always people along the way as you grow. Initially as an entrepreneur you try to get that product fit. Once you get that then it really becomes about scaling the people organization and it is really about building the best teams, getting the right people. There are always times when it works or it doesn’t work as you grow and as you grow quickly those things can be challenging at points. I think those two are probably the biggest ones.Martin: Can you elaborate on how are you currently acquiring or doing the sales for larger customers or the smaller customers?Al: How are we breaking in?Martin: Yes, because you said that your sales approach is different between those two segments.Al: The biggest thing when you sell to small companies is the u sers, the sales reps and the decision maker are very close. They might sit in the same office. It might be a small company of 10 people and there might be 10 reps using the product and their manager is right there and has a credit card. And it is a more simplified approach or a faster approach. It can be more driven by the users using the product.In a large company, there may be many levels in between the user and the budget owner. What that means is that you have to sell on multiple levels and you have to be able to get users using it but also get a senior leader understand the budget reasons for doing it and the risks and the rewards and the benefits to that level. So what we have found is it is a sale where you have to at multiple levels and do bottoms up selling and also top down selling where you want to break in high and go low or go low and break in high. If you do those both well everyone up and down the chain is a supporter.We have had situations where we don’t do that we ll, where maybe the users like the product but the leader doesn’t know why it is valuable or vice versa the leader likes the product but the users don’t know why it is valuable. And that will create friction because you don’t get buy in across the organization. A lot of times the approach needs to have a multiple layer approach for to work effectively.Martin: Imagine, you identified the budget owner and you are pitching him so that you convince him. At some point having this really in parallel for me It is quite hard because you first need to get it into their hands and if the budget owns says, “Yes, now you can do it, then you have some kind of staging: signed off by the budget owner, pushing through all the organization, penetrating the users, and making sure that they are using it. And then have this kind of dual track approach. Or do you see this in another way?Al: It hopefully starts that way. If you start high and go down is also a great place to start. The problem can be if you can’t get the attention initially and maybe after starting low you can get attention high.The other thing we found is even if you get the decision makers initially excited we have seen a lot of buyer approach these days where they are very collaborative and even though the leader might like it they really want to see that their team has adopted it and likes it: So, I am interested, but you have to prove to me that my team will use it and use it well and I am going to see value from it.”So we often do these trials or pilots program to say let’s get a hundred users using the product and will report back up both back up to the user but also what is the value. Here is some deals we have closed with ClearSlide, this is the value that we drove. And once you meet that you really need everyone on board and those leaders will be looking for feedback from their teams in terms of how effective it was.Martin: What is the typical time of having such a trial period because for yo u showing some tracktion and usage?Al: It varies. It can be anywhere for smaller companies it can be a couple of weeks and for larger companies it can be a couple of months I’d say. And then showing the value really depends on sales cycles. Sometimes they will sell very quickly in which case you have got short deals, in other cases the sales take longer so you can show pipeline. Here is the customers that have been moving the pipeline and here is how we have generated a value.Martin: Then basically you are doing an A/B test, so here is how you performed before and now look at the sales pattern and the closing rate and so after using our tool it is like that. So here is the value.Al: Exactly. We show the team how they used to sell or that team and some other teams. What has been great is once you have sales that have gone through the process then they know the value of ClearSlide. So sometimes at that point they just buy it because it has been proven to them. But if you try to show credibility then these are some of the steps that we go through.Martin: And are you seeing a lot of recommendations or referrals because if you are like you said targeting some sales department of company A and some of the sales reps is leaving the company, taking this experience to another company and then having something like inbound sales?Al: Absolutely. One that is specific for sales is they are tend to be very word of mouth driven and they very much get credibility value what the other co-workers use or what the other colleagues use or have used in the past. We have very often seen that work very effectively. Actually our program is here to track when users leave companies and where they go so we can then sell to the new company as well. We find that to be very effective.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM AL LIEBMartin: Al, you have started so many companies directly after university. What have been the major learnings for you that you would like to share with first time entreprene urs about really starting and building companies?Al: I’d say one big lesson I have learned is that in terms of ongoing process oftentimes an entrepreneur will have an idea and launch the idea whenever the initial phase is. Sometimes that works well, fantastic, sometimes it doesn’t but then ok, it didn’t work. On to the next thing, right, I am not going to do this. And what I have found is that it is very much iterative optimization type of approach where you have to get out there, try something, see what works, listen to customers very well and then adjust quickly based on that and keep that loop between the feedback you are getting and your product very tight and fast. If you do that effectively you can get better quickly and things can go in a positive direction.I have found that actually one of the biggest drivers of success is the ability to iterate in ongoing way, in a way that really listens to the customer needs more so than anything else.Martin: And what other type of learnings did you have, especially with problems and situations that are most likely to occur when you are an entrepreneur?Al: One of the things for starting entrepreneurs is as companies go through different stages the needs of the companies change and the needs of the kinds of people change, and even the way you spend your times changes.As an example, in two-person company it is all about trying to figure out your vision and the product that you are trying to build and that is all that really matters. Then when you are five or ten and fifteen or twenty, a hundred or two hundred things change and the needs change. One example is what I found is at about 50 people you can know everybody and everybody knows everybody else. There is not a lot of need of process or system and those sorts of things. Once you get 60 or a hundred those things start to break down. Someone gets hired and everybody: “Who is the person that.” And you start to have needing processing more efficiently the channels of how things go through.I think to be sensitive to what your needs are right now the way you need to spend time as an entrepreneur or co-founder, or your team needs to spend time it can change very quickly. And if you are looking for it you can be effective, but if you are not you can get caught behind it and something that was working two weeks ago sometimes isn’t working anymore.Martin: And how did you feel once you have crossed like 50-60 people coming to your office and say, “Actually, I don’t know these people. Is this my company?”Al: I think it started happening around 100-150. Particularly when you are going quickly. Jim and I and other founders definitely wanted in the early days to interview everybody. So up until 50 or a hundred we had interviewed everyone or at least knew it was part of the process. And then there was a point at which you stop doing that.It is tricky too when you do sessions around the vision of the company and we have meetings where we tried to connect with all new people but sometimes on those meetings you go around and you would ask: How long have you been working here?, and they would say: Four months. And you are like “How have we not met yet?” It is a weird feeling for sure once you come across that stage.Martin: Al, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. It was a pleasure.Al: It was a pleasure to meet you. Thanks for having me.Martin: Thanks, awesome!

Anxiety and Anxiety Related Disorders - Free Essay Example

Introduction Anxiety. Anxiety is an evolutionarily adaptive response to danger that helps facilitate avoidance behavior, but it becomes maladaptive when it interferes with daily life[1]. Maladaptive anxiety is characterized by excessive and enduring fear and avoidance of threats (out of proportion to the threat or to nonexistent threats) [2]. Current scientific evidence indicates that anxiety arises from disruptions in the neural circuits used to process sensory stimuli and determine threat from those stimuli, leading to a state of high arousal and negative valence [3]. There are noticeable differences between fear and anxiety; fear responses are due to clear and perceived threats, with an immediate fight or flight response, and it subsides as the threat is removed. In comparison, anxiety responses are due to unknown threats, and they last longer than fear responses [4, 5]. Epidemiology. Anxiety related disorders are the most prevalent form of psychiatric illness in the world, and one of the leading causes of disability [6, 7]. One in four individuals is likely to have or be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder in their lifetime [8], and the 12 month prevalence of anxiety disorders in Europe is 14% [6]. Disability is exacerbated by a relatively early age of onset in comparison to other psychiatric disorders [1, 9], along with a high likelihood symptom recurrence [1, 9, 10]. Anxiety is highly comorbid with other mental disorders which can complicate treatment and diagnosis [9, 11]. Anxiety disorders can disrupt cognitive development and social rules, and can reduce quality of life by causing problems including school failure, underachievement, unemployment or underemployment, and social problems [2, 12]. Diagnosis of Anxiety. The diagnostic criteria for individual anxiety disorders varies across disorder and diagnostic manual used, either the DSM-5 or ICD-10. Genetic markers, blood tests, and psychophysiological testing lack the sensitivity or specificity to be used for the diagnosis of these disorders, so a trained physician must rely on the clinical interview, screening questionnaire, and subjective judgement [2, 4]. Distinguishing anxiety from other medical conditions is a major challenge to the proper diagnosis of anxiety, as presence of other mental or physical conditions are commonly associated with anxiety[13, 14]. Treatment of anxiety. Behavioral therapies are the first line treatment, but pharmacological treatment can be used as an alternative or adjunctive therapy[2, 15, 16]. Some of the pharmacological targets in anxiety include serotonergic, adrenergic, glutamatergic, neuropeptide, and endocannabinoid systems [15, 16]. Antidepressants, such as SSRIs or SNRIs, are the first line treatment for anxiety because of their efficacy, but they are associated with some adverse effects, including common side effects similar to symptoms of anxiety, discontinuation syndrome, and risk of increased suicidal ideation in youth [17]. Brain Regions Associated with Anxiety. Many regions, including amygdala (BLA and CeA), ventral hippocampus (vHPC), ventral tegmental area (VTA), medial dorsal thalamus (MdThal), nucleus accumbens (NAc), and several areas in the prefrontal cortex (cingulate cortex CingCx, prelimbic cortex PrL, infralimbic cortex IL) are important for anxiety[18-27]. Brain Region Actions Amygdala (BLA) identification and interpretation of threat as aversive or dangerous [3], positive or negative valence, predicts whether something will be threatening [28-30] Amygdala (CeA and BNST) directly invigorate anxiety response, influence threat appraisal likelihood [31] mPFC (Cingulate Cortex) regulator of anxiogenic activity: resistance to extinction of fear memories [32] PrL PFC fear memory acquisition and freezing response to cues [33-35] IL PFC Fear memory extinction [34, 36-40] NaC and VTA adjusting motivation for appetitive behaviors: cost/benefit analysis, providing reward for behaviors, suppression of anxiety behaviors when benefits are estimated to outweigh costs [41-46] Call to Action In the field of psychiatry, multiple challenges affect diagnosis and treatment of anxiety disorders. Diagnosis and treatment are only sought between 3 to 30 years after onset of symptoms, varying by country, with the median globally being 21 years[47]. This delay can be due to a lack of mechanistic diagnostic tests [4, 48], patients presenting with somatic symptoms that are complications of anxiety[48], underuse of systematic application diagnostic criteria [49] and that symptoms overlap considerably among different diagnoses while varying significantly among patients with the same diagnosis [50]. Previous research has found anxiety to be partially heritable, but exact replicable loci have yet to be found [2, 51, 52]. Brain based taxonomy is lacking [53], and efforts to find new therapeutic targets have languished due to the lack of a mechanistic understanding of these disorders [3]. The goal for research in the future, then, is to identify neural substrates of anxiety and develop clinically relevant predictors. Utilizing and understanding the electrophysiology of pathological anxiety will allow for better diagnosis and treatment of anxiety disorders. Rodent models in particular hold promise in understanding the conserved circuits that underlie anxiety [3] We postulated that a neural signature predicting anxiety related behavior exists at the network level. To test this hypothesis, we tested multiple forms of anxiogenic drug (Fluoxetine, FG-7142) in C57Bl/6J mice in the elevated plus maze (EPM), injected fluoxetine in these mice while in the homecage and conducted multi-circuit in vivo recordings from a subset of anxiety related regions including the prelimbic cortex (PrL_Cx), infralimbic cortex (IL_Cx), NAc, central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA), basolateral amygdala (BLA), VTA, and VHip, then used machine learning to elucidate the anxiety related signature. Experimental Background Electrophysiology. Local field potentials (LFPs) are measurements of pooled brain activity of neurons within 1 mm of an implanted electrode, their inputs, and their outputs [54]. They are neural responses to experimental events and are analyzed by decomposing the spectrum into frequency bands[55]. LFPs have been used to study mental illnesses, including anxiety [citation needed]. [Note: will be further completed next semester when LFP work is conducted] Elevated Plus Maze as Measure of Mouse Anxiety. The elevated plus maze is a widely used behavioral assay for anxiety, that has been well validated across several measures. The elevated plus maze is assumed to be an ethological and unconditioned model that, unlike other anxiety tests, does not rely on noxious stimuli or conditioned responses [56-58]. Previously, the EPM has been used to assess drug effects, including anxiolytics and anxiogenics [59, 60], to determine brain site or mechanisms associated with fear and anxiety [61-67], as a measure indicative of altered emotionality in animals subjected to biochemical or gene manipulation [68-71] and subtypes of anxiety disorders [61]. Specifically, it has been used to measure the anxiogenic effects of FG-7142, and fluoxetine [69, 70, 72]. The maze has four arms, two open and two closed, all with open roofs. The arms are arranged in a plus shape with the same types of arms opposite each other [57, 60]. Anxiety is traditionally assessed by using the ratio of time spent on the open arms to time spent on the closed arms, and percentage of entries [56, 57, 69]. The aversive open arms are avoided, and freezing and defecation are increased in the open arms [59]. Behavior is typically recorded and scored for the first 5 minutes of the test, with time spent and entries made on the open and closed arms are measured, as well as avoidance behaviors and risk assessment [56, 61]. Open Field Test as Measure of Mouse Anxiety. The open field test is a simple measure of anxiety, ambulatory motion, and other behaviors. In measurement of anxiety, it is similar to the EPM in that it measures the innate avoidance of open spaces, which indicates anxiety. Mice who spend less time in the center of the open field test are coded as more anxious [73]. Beta Carboline FG-7142. The beta carboline class of molecules acts as an inverse agonists on the benzodiazepine site of GABA-A receptors[74]. Inverse agonists as a class are convulsant or pro-convulsant and have shown anxiogenic properties by self report [74]. FG-7142 (N-methyl-b-carboline-3-carboxamide) is a partial inverse agonist of benzodiazepine receptors that causes anxiety in both humans[75] and mice[69], has kindling effects [74], upregulates adrenoreceptors, and decreases subsequent actions of GABA and beta carboline agonists [72]. The molecule is not selective, but does have higher affinity for the ? ±1 subunit-containing GABA-A receptor than other ? ± subunits [75, 76] . FG-7142 has several effects on the brain, including activating of the basal forebrain cholinergic neurons, related to attention and vigilance, and activation of mesolimbocortical dopamine output to the PFC leading to increased sensory drive output from the BLA [72, 77-79]. While FG-7142 is a convulsant as well as an anxiogenic, the dose required for anxiogenic purposes is lower than that required for convulsive purposes, allowing for usefulness for experimental induction of anxiety sans convulsions [69]. In the elevated plus maze, FG-7142 decreases the amount of time spent in open arms [69, 72], and its anxiogenic action may be mediated by the 3 subunit of the GABA-A receptor [72]. Fluoxetine. In clinical populations, chronic SSRI treatment is useful for the treatment of anxiety and depression, but has been shown to paradoxically increase anxiety and depression upon acute treatment [80, 81]. The treatment lag and anxiogenic effect of SSRIs in the acute phase may contribute to treatment noncompliance[81]. In preclinical animal research populations, namely mice and rats, fluoxetine, an SSRI that acts as a selective 5-HT reuptake inhibitor [71, 82-84], has been shown to increase anxiety related behaviors in the EPM[85-87], open field test [71], light/dark test [71], the free exploration test [85] and will also potentiate defensive behaviors[84]. In C57Bl/6J mice specifically, fluoxetine has been shown to be anxiogenic in the EPM at a concentration of 20 mg/kg [70, 88]. Methods Subjects Subjects were adult male C57BL/6J mice, purchased from Jackson Labs. The mice were housed in groups of 5 per cage, housed in a humidity and temperature controlled environment, with a standard 12h light/dark cycle where lights are on at 7 am. Water and food were available ad libitum. In the testing of FG-7142 and fluoxetine in the EPM, mice weighed between 20-35 g and were 9 weeks at the time of Elevated Plus Maze testing. All mice were nave to the EPM. In the testing of fluoxetine in the home cage, mice were implanted at 9 weeks, and were tested at 11 weeks in the home cage. Studies were conducted with approved protocols from Duke University Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and were in accordance with the NIH guidelines for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. Drugs FG-7142 was suspended in physiological (0.9%) saline containing 3% Tween 80 and injected i.p. at 10 mg/kg [69]. Fluoxetine HCl (Sigma-Aldrich, USA) was dissolved in physiological saline and injected i.p. at 20mg/kg [70]. Apparatus The elevated plus maze apparatus has black plexiglass walls and flooring, with white tape on the floor of the arms. There are no walls on the open arms, but cm of tape is on the edges to prevent mice from falling off the arms. The maze is mounted in a plexiglass pedestal on the floor and is 40 cm tall with 305.08 cm arms; walls on closed arms are 15.25 cm high. General Procedure of the EPM All experiments were conducted during the mouse light phase. Mice were habituated to handling and injection for 7 days prior to testing, with either saline for 5 days and vehicle for 2 days (FG-7142) or saline for 7 days (Fluoxetine). Treatment conditions were randomly assigned, and the experimenter was blind to treatment. Mice were tested in order of cage and mouse number. Light intensity was low light (50 lux) for all experiments. Mice were brought up to the testing room at least one hour before testing to allow for acclimation to the testing environment. After injection, mice were either placed in a new cage (FG-7142) or in the home cage (Fluoxetine) and allowed to acclimate for 30 minutes. In the elevated plus maze, mice were individually placed on the central square, facing a closed arm, and freely allowed to explore for 10 minutes (FG-7142) or 5 minutes (Fluoxetine). Between each mouse, the apparatus was cleaned with Rescue wipes (Virox, Oakville ON). Fluoxetine Injections in Home Cage Mice were handled, injected with saline, and habituated to single housing for 30 minutes after injection for 7 days prior to testing. On the day of testing, mice were habituated to the room for 60 minutes prior to testing, connected to a headstage without anesthesia (Blackrock Microsystems, UT, USA), recorded 5 minutes of baseline LFP activity, injected with fluoxetine, then placed in a separate cage and singly housed. Recordings were initiated immediately, data was used after 30 minutes. Experiment was conducted under low light (50 lux) conditions. LFP data was collected using Cerebus system (Blackrock Microsystems, Inc., Salt Lake City, UT), animals were video recorded using Neuromotive software (Blackrock Microsystems, Inc., Salt Lake City, UT) and analyzed for time spent standing still using Ethovision XT 7.1 software (Noldus Information Technology, Wageningen, Netherlands). Open Field Test Open field testing was conducted immediately after completion of home cage fluoxetine recordings 1 hour after fluoxetine injection. Mice were placed in a 17.5 in long x 17.5 inch wide x 11.75 in high chamber for 5 minutes. LFP data was collected using Cerebus system (Blackrock Microsystems, Inc., Salt Lake City, UT), location of animals was recorded using Neuromotive software (Blackrock Microsystems, Inc., Salt Lake City, UT) and analyzed for time spent in the center using Ethovision XT 7.1 software (Noldus Information Technology, Wageningen, Netherlands). Neurophysiological data acquisition Neurophysiological data was acquired at 30kHz using the Cerebus acquisition system (Blackrock Microsystems, UT, USA). LFPs were low pass filtered at 250 Hz, and stored at 1000 Hz. Voltage was measured by comparing data from each wire against a wire within the same brain area that had a SNR 3:1. Electrode implantation surgery Mice were anesthetized with 1.5% isoflurane, placed in a stereotaxic device, and had screws implanted above the cerebellum and anterior cranium. Bundles were stereotaxically centered based on coordinates measured from bregma (AMY: -1.4mm and 40.86 AP, -2.9mm and 22.91 ML, -3.85 and 8.57 mm DV from the dura; NAc: 1.3 and 45.56 mm AP, -2.25 and 20.91 mm ML, -4.1 and 8.72 mm DV from the dura; PrL: 1.5 and 45.76 mm AP, 0 and 23.16mm ML, -2.25 and 10.57 mm DV from the dura; VTA: -3.4 and 40.86 mm AP, -.25 and 22.91 mm ML, -4.25 and 8.57 mm DV from the dura; VHip: -3.3 and 40.96 mm AP, -3 and 20.16 mm ML, -3.75 and 9.07 mm DV from the dura. Histology was performed on implantation sites after testing was complete to confirm recording sites used for analysis. Behavioral testing was performed when all animals had stable weights, at approximately 1.5 weeks after surgery. Statistical Analyses We ran the Shapiro Wilkes test for normality, the F test for equal variances, and two sample t tests for equal and unequal variances depending on the F test for equal variances. LFPs We used in vivo recording to quantify local field potentials (LFPs). LFP data was analyzed using non-negative matrix factorization, which is predictive of behavior and extrapolate across different subjects. It quantifies spectral power and coherence in certain frequency ranges to identify network level signatures.