It allows businesses to make quick, targeted decisions about marketing, product development, and sales. Gary: Vennli is the platform for visualizing and analyzing how customers make choices. RJ: Your current role is Co-Founder and CEO of Vennli, can you tell us about the company and the market need you are addressing?
Gary: There are skills that exhibit themselves as operating traits which I would articulate as follows: 1) unilateral commitment to the success of your venture, 2) natural ability to sell your company vision to a growing list of investors, 3) multi-tasking, multi-threading, parallel path work process, 4) talent acquisition, retention and development practice, 5) respect for the centering importance of an articulated and quantitative business model, 6) continuous curious nature on all facets of the product, market and customer set. RJ: Are there a few key skills you could highlight that you think are particularly important for aspiring entrepreneurs to develop? Notre Dame is now decidedly in the entrepreneurial game. So we started with curriculum, then a business plan competition, then an alumni network, then social entrepreneurship, then and Innovation Park and now we even have a Chicago Based Notre Dame DNA angel investment group-the IrishAngels. At that time I was spending a lot of time on Sand Hill Road and I witnessed first hand the integration of the Universities and the technology community. In the late 90’s Notre Dame was on a mission to compete with the likes of Stanford and to do so they had to create an entrepreneurial environment in the business school from scratch. Gary: At the start our goal with the Center was to “Create a Sense of the Possible” for Notre Dame students.
RJ: You are also the benefactor of Notre Dame’s Gigot Center for Entrepreneurship. I am running the Visio playbook, looking to partner with Microsoft, and using Docusign (a Frazier investment) for all of our contract signings.
MICROSOFT VISIO STANFORD SOFTWARE
After the dynamics of 2008+ and a career in advertising and technology and with retirement in sight-I could taste it-in 2013 I decided to become a co-founder and CEO of a start up spin out from Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana-not Seattle.įast forward to today where Vennli is 20+ people strong has 120 customers is defining a new software category called Choice Visualization and Analytics and is on Version 3.0 of its software. This also gave me the war chest for endowing the Entrepreneurship Center at Notre Dame, plunged me into angel investing, and ultimately led to a two fund stint in Venture Capital with Frazier Technology Ventures. This “Windows” emersion catapulted me as an investor and CMO into Visio, a company that created the business drawing category and took me on a scaling, IPO, growth ride all off one platform. As CMO we worked all facets of the marketing mix, through all existing US channels across the entire portfolio of products.
MICROSOFT VISIO STANFORD WINDOWS
I had the great experience to see Microsoft in action in the early 90’s when it launched a flurry of new products that defined and dominated the desktop software industry-Windows, Office, Access, Windows NT et al. My path was 16 years in advertising both small and large agency alike-with Leo Burnett and the Ogilvy Group in the mix, then via a winning new business presentation at Microsoft the ultimate evolution of my career into technology marketing. Yes this has made me a rabid Packer and Fighting Irish fan but beyond that a Midwestern who sought his fame and fortune on both coasts.
Gary: Two foundations for me are my upbringing in Green Bay, Wisconsin and my education at the University of Notre Dame. Can you share with our readers a bit about yourself from how you got your start and the various endeavors you’ve undertaken?
GrowthCap speaks with Gary Gigot, a former Visio executive and benefactor of the Gigot Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Notre Dame.