Today's Entrepreneur: Crick Waters

Kristin Karaoglu · September 28, 2012 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/2a82

No. 1 mistake: Keep on networking

Today's Entrepreneur is Crick Waters, CEO of Conga. According to his VEQ, Crick is a thought leader and is good at networking and fund raising.

Conga was one of the companies presenting in Vator Splash SF.

Vator’s community is the home to entrepreneurs who embrace their passion and follow their dreams. Our profiles allow members to express themselves by sharing their interests, lessons learned, as well as bits and pieces of their roller-coaster journey.

These profiles give entrepreneurs an opportunity to showcase themselves and tell their story. So if you are an entrepreneur, a serial entrepreneur, or even an aspiring entrepreneur, we'd like to hear from you.

I am a(n):
Entrepreneur

Companies I've founded or co-founded:
Ribbit

Startups I worked for:
Applied Process Technology, Ribbit, Conga

If you are an entrepreneur, why?
I love creating things that people value

What's most frustrating and rewarding about entrepreneurship/innovation?
Frustrating: Knowing deep in your heart you're going to have a valuable technology and service while repeatedly being told in one form or another the opposite.

Rewarding: Being told how great what you've build is - especially by those who had told you otherwise.

What are the top three lessons you've learned as an entrepreneur?
Wow. Let me boil it down to one top lesson: Keep on networking.
I love what The "Power of Pull" by John Hagel et al. teaches. There are some great lessons learned in the TechCrunch article, "The Ribbit Rollercoaster: A Founder’s Story From Concept To $105M Exit" (https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/21/the-ribbit-rollercoaster-a-founders-story-from-concept-to-105m-exit/) and my follow-up post, "
The Rest of the Story of The Ribbit Rollercoaster: A Founder’s Story From Concept To $105M Exit" https://crickwaters.wordpress.com/?p=411&preview=true.

(Want to be profiled? Just fill out your Vator profile and we'll find you! Or you can email newsroom@vator.tv)

Kristin Karaoglu

Woman of many skills: Database System Engineer; SplashX event producer; Author of Startup Teams

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Related Companies, Investors, and Entrepreneurs

Conga

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on July 29, 2012

Brief description:

Conga discovers the social relevance between people - whom you should know, within a group, at an event, or wherever you are.

Brief highlights:

Our science applies sophisticated machine learning algorithms to understand the underlying factors behind your professional relationships

The problem or opportunity:

The value of social networks is stalling. They have become saturated with "the people we may know."

“New insight, experiences, and capabilities…come from “the edges of our social networks.” (John Hagel et al., For Ways to Use "Pull" to Increase Your Success, HBR 4/22/2009)

"People we should know," is a hard - yet important - problem. Conga's science is able to accurately predict and recommend new relationships.

Conga does Social Discovery and People recommendation as a Service. Companies from large to small are finding the need to make recommendations between people. From global technology forums to local social application services, the people matching/recommendation function has become a ubiquitous need. Conga is the platform that meets this need with science.

By focusing on the recommendation science and making the recommendation results available through our API, we give developers access to better technology more quickly and at lower cost than they can achieve on their own.

Competitive advantage

Social relevance is typically relegated to a "people you may know" algorithm in such social networking sites as LinkedIn and Facebook. Other companies in the social discovery space rely on fact matching such as "you both like Lady Gaga and follow Barack Obama" as their basis for social recommendation.

Conga uses applied science by identifying a pool of ~100,000 factors that characterize the motivations behind your social connections and train the Conga social relevance engine. No input more than the linking social networking sites is required of the user.

Conga is the first platform solution to the problem of predicting social relevance.

Our team includes serial entrepreneurs (founder, Ribbit), stellar CTO (chief architect for Platform as a Service at Sun Microsystems), and PhD entrepreneur neuroscientist as chief scientist.

Crick Waters

Joined Vator on July 29, 2012

Tall enough that most people get a Crick in the neck talking to me at a stand-up party. Starter, creator, builder. Competitive masters swimmer. Husband and father of two. Ribbit co-founder.