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Uber's uber  large funding round has been the talk of the day in the tech community in the last week. And it should be, since it doesn't happen very often that a four year old company raises $1.2B at a $17B valuation . In fact, according to this Bloomberg story , Uber's new valuation sets a record for investments into privately-held tech startups. When I first heard about Uber a few years ago, I didn't quite get it in the beginning. The traditional taxi system works quite well in Germany, and I thought that the advantage of using an app to order a cab as opposed to making a quick call wasn't such a big deal. Also, the expensive "private limo" service, which Uber started with in the beginning, didn't appeal to me. After using mytaxi in Germany, I started to like the idea, but it was the launch of UberX and my recent two-months stay in San Francisco which turned me into a huge Uber fan. What is it that makes Uber so compelling? It's a number of sma...

Note: This is the second part of a post which first appeared on KISSmetrics' blog . The first part is here , and here is the original guest post on the KISSmetrics blog. Thanks go to Bill Macaitis , CMO at Zendesk , for providing extremely valuable input on multi-attribution analysis. Multi-touch Attribution Analysis – Giving Some Credit to the “Assist” Multi-touch attribution, as defined in this good and detailed post , is “the process of understanding and assigning credit to marketing channels that eventually lead to conversions. An attribution model is a set of rules that determine how credit for conversions should be attributed to various touch points in conversion paths.” It’s easier than it sounds, and, since this is the year of the World Cup, let me explain it using a soccer analogy. Multi-touch attribution gives the credit for a goal to not only the scorer but also gives some credit to the players who prepared the goal. Soccer player statistics often calculate scor...

Note: This article first appeared as a guest post on the popular KISSmetrics blog . Thanks to Hiten Shah and Sean Work  at KISSmetrics for publishing it. I'm republishing the post here as a series of two shorter posts, with a few small edits. Anyone who has ever worked in marketing or advertising has heard the quote, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” It is from John Wanamaker and dates back to the 19th century. Fortunately, the industry has come a long way since then, and especially in the last 10 to 20 years, new technologies have made advertising more measurable than ever. However, there’s still a considerable gap between what people could measure and what they actually are measuring, and that leads to significant under-optimization of advertising and marketing dollars. In B2B SaaS, which we at Point Nine Capital focus a lot of our efforts on, there are two techniques that I feel are particularly important but not...