Wednesday, September 16, 2015

VC firm Accel Partners 'adds value' to startups in digital marketing

Today, Venture Capital (VC) money is flowing freely and any good startup has atleast 5-6 top quality VC firms who would be more than happy to invest in that company. In such a scenario, a founder often looks for ways in which those VC firms can add value apart from just providing capital. Hence, VC firms try and 'add value' in multiple ways. One of the ways VC firms do this is by hiring partners who have had 'operating experience' and thus can help their portfolio companies with overall strategy or day-to-day operations. Another way VC firms can 'add value' is by making important introductions for the founders (to customers, partners, other relevant portfolio companies etc.)

Accel Partners has come out with its own way of adding value to startups. Accel has created a tool (Growthverse) that maps the entire marketing technology ecosystem. Its an interactive visualization tool that helps startups find companies that can help them with different areas of digital marketing. Given that the marketing technology space has become really crowded, it can often become very overwhelming for startups to find the 'right' company for its digital marketing needs (paid acquisition, content marketing etc.) and a tool like this saves them a lot of time and resources.

This has multiple advantages for a VC firm like Accel - (1) it's a sort of value that Accel is providing to startups to navigate a relatively complex arena and hence positioning itself as a 'value-added' partner and (2) its a discovery tool for Accel as marketing technology companies that are undiscovered and might want to be a part of this tool will reach out to Accel!

Further details in the Techcrunch article:

http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/15/accel-partners-looks-to-map-the-marketing-technology-ecosystem/

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