As I was entering AO OnDemand 2014 and moving toward the main conference auditorium, I ran into Kevin Longa, a young entrepreneur I had met two years ago at a Hackers & Founders meetup.  We got to talking and I found him very pleasant; having just graduated from UCLA he was on a search for what next he wanted to do.  Keving found that deciding on whether to join a startup, go traveling to experience more of his Asian roots (he’s mixed) or continue his education was challenging and in some ways confusing.

Well, whenever I meet young people at that stage in life I believe it’s important to impress upon them that taking some time up-front to experience life in other parts of the world and with other people than usual is often a good way to get perspective and get started on the next stage of life.  I believe it’s important to actually take some time to experience life, before being continually caught up in the hustle and bustle of one of the most stressful cultures on earth—American society.

To my surprise he listened attentively to my pontification and later embarked upon a long trip to Asia while also shooting a documentary series encompassing the four passions of his life – food, entrepreneurship, travel and film.  He has now reached the point where he is in post-production with some of the work he has created and is continuously adding to his body of work.  And above all—he seems happy.

Encountering him now, two years later, was a great experience for me.  After his travels he received a scholarship to Draper University where he further immersed himself in the art and craft of entrepreneurship.  His greatest takeaway was how to think about problem solving, team building, adversity and loneliness as an entrepreneur, rather than hard skills such as law, market research or accounting.

There is no doubt in my mind that Kevin will be successful.  He has an ability to learn and to adapt to new situations in a way that’s unusual for a lot of people.  In addition, he has that quality that is absolutely necessary in an entrepreneur: tenacity. 

I’ve seen so many get out of the game just as they were about to break through.  The level of determination and sacrifice necessary to succeed is rarely stressed enough, but anyone who has succeeded knows that success would often elude us, without “stick-to-itiveness” and an almost masochistic ability to increase commitment when others would judge it hopeless. 

This is true regardless of industry and calling—the cost of entrepreneurship is high and fraught with failure.  People like Kevin will succeed because he works tirelessly, learning and pushing forward even when things are difficult. 

This week I attended AO OnDemand 2014—a good conference for understanding how the enterprise SaaS ecosystem and its up-and-coming young companies are developing.  The conference also details market changes that are happening around mergers and acquisitions and the strategic moves that large enterprise software players are making to position themselves.

As usual there was an interesting group of people there, everything from startup executives to representatives from EMC, SAP, Oracle and others, which made for good networking with a variety of people from interesting companies.

What I’d like to highlight today is BeyondCore, a very interesting data analytics company I’ve been following on the Internet for more than a year.  Since I’m in the big data analytics market myself, I spend a lot of time getting to know the environment and make it a point to follow the most interesting new companies. 

I had the pleasure of meeting the newly hired VP Marketing Sandra Peterson and their CEO Arijit Sengupta.  They’ve created a brilliant piece of software that truly solves some of the problems in the data analytics world—especially when directed at the business user.  Not only does it automatically look for what’s interesting in the data and present it to you, but it also provides you with an automated analysis to help you better understand the relevant points in the data. 

These are exactly the types of functionality that Sandra highlighted when I asked her why she joined the company.  She had only come on board three days prior, so of course it was interesting to understand why an experienced senior marketing executive would join a young company (other than the options package and pay, of course…).

What she brought up was the unique combination of personal characteristics of Arijit, the founder.  His tenacity as a technology visionary to struggle with the problems of building a company against all odds and his infectious communication of the advantages in the product he’d created in a way that average people could understand were clear attractions for her beyond the technology itself.  I certainly saw both when he briefly demoed the product for me.

BeyondCore has an impressive product with a good team; I wish them good fortune and will continue to follow their development and successes.

My second day here at the Stanford Summit confirmed my initial impressions from the cocktail party last Thursday. I have found that the age trend I noted in my earlier post has strengthened after interacting with a much larger cross section of attendees.

The cocktail party last week was for the AO 250, i.e., the companies selected as the 250 hottest emerging technology companies in the world for 2008.

At the conference I interacted with CEOs and venture capitalists from about 700 companies—a significant number of them with graying hair, confirming my initial impression.

After a day filled with excellent presentations and speakers and then chatting with various participants during the evening reception, I was truly impressed by the savvy and innovative ideas being brought to life by the “old timers.”

One of the most fascinating is Wyndstorm, lead by 54 year Marian Sabety. That very innovative technology companies are founded and led by women is an anomaly. That the woman is mature is even more unusual.

In Wyndstorm’s case, Marian is a long time innovator who has brought to the market a solution to the web advertising crisis.

Understanding that at the present moment only 7% of advertising budgets are spent online, advertising agencies and corporate chieftains are desperately searching for proven solutions that reach core and targeted audiences in an interactive environment.

Wyndstorm’s social frames pull targeted customers from other sites they frequent directly into an interactive, virtual place where the marketer controls the content, reinforcing image, brand and messaging on a one to one, razor targeted basis. Very impressive.

I believe that the graying of the executive suite in startups has everything to do with the need for execution, reliability and monetization in addition to innovation of technology. Companies need people who are not new to the game to succeed in this market.

Younger people may have many ideas, but they lack the experience to execute in a manner that allows ideas to be monetized rapidly in a variety of economic situations and enables the industry to execute from a strategic perspective.

Thinking about it, even the Google guys needed to bring in seasoned executives to grow the company from an idea to industry power player.

KG Charles-Harris is CEO of Emanio and a special contributor to MAPping Company Success.

In attending the AO 250 cocktail party last night, I was struck by something that differed significantly from the first ones I attended after moving to the US and getting involved with Garage Technology Ventures. Guy Kawasaki was a powerful force (he still is), as were the exuberance of youth in driving new technology and investment dollars.

This time around the surroundings were less lavish, as could be expected since we have all learned that spending money is not the same thing as making money. However, a significant difference was also the graying of the participants at the party.

Other than many of the people working at AlwaysOn (the conference co-host), most of the participants were over 35 years of age. Gone were the 22 year old CEOs that were the mainstay of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Now, the CEOs and management teams seemed seasoned and focused on clear drivers of value creation.

Not that I have anything against young CEOs; today they are creating significant value for investors—Facebook is just one example. However, the management teams are different today in that they are very business savvy, rather than having lofty concepts, ideals or delusions about how to create value.

Now, perhaps it is my perspective that has changed.  I’m 10 years older than the last time I participated in events like this and during that time I have been active in the investment banking, entrepreneur and venture capital arena in Europe and the US and consequently have matured slightly. At present, I’m running my fourth startup; Emanio is actually a restart from a European company I co-founded and brought from Scandinavia to the US in 2000.

Along the way I’ve learned a few lessons, especially during the past 5 years during which I not only raised money, but also did acquisitions in a difficult market. Doing this while bootstrapping the company (building it up without any outside investors) has taught me these lessons through considerable pain. Bootstrapping is definitely not for the faint of heart—everything takes longer and is more difficult than when one is well funded—but it does force one to possess a certain discipline.

Having become one myself, it warmed my heart to interact with all these entrepreneurs, as well as with Tony Perkins, Marc Sternberg and the others at AlwaysOn, and sharing in their stories. It was truly inspirational.

Come back for more of KG’s impressions tomorrow.

KG Charles-Harris is CEO of Emanio and a special contributor to MAPping Company Success.