By Grace W. Ueng

Special to TechJournal South

Joe Epperson, CEO of Max Point, addressing the NCCBA. Both photos on this page by Tingting Liu.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. – On March 23^rd , The North Carolina Chinese Business Association, which serves as a catalyst in bridging China-North Carolina science and technology business relationships, hosted a standing room only crowd at the RTP Foundation that came to hear Joe Epperson, the visionary co-founder and CEO of MaxPoint.

He held the attention of analytic gurus, MBA faculty and students, and entrepreneurs; many having experience with or an interest in business in China. He shared his contagious passion and inside stories on starting and successfully funding an analytics powerhouse, why he chose to move from the Bay Area – where he was an early eBay employee –  to the Triangle, and how China will someday benefit from Maxpoint’s ingenuity.

MaxPoint is a high growth and industry-leading consumer targeting technology company that serves household name brands, including those of my former Fortune 500 consumer packaged goods employer, and retail powerhouses.

They are backed by blue chip funds Trinity Ventures in the Bay Area and Seattle-based Madrona, whose success stories include Starbucks and Amazon.

MaxPoint leverages proprietary data and targeting techniques for online advertising efficiencies to drive in-store sales for the retail, CPG, and pharmaceutical verticals.

In interviewing the audience following Epperson’s talk, one SAS product manager told me what MaxPoint is doing is “really, really cool…more significant than Groupon for major retailers.”

Many were struck by an interesting fact Joe presented: 75 percent of all US consumer spending occurs at retail within 15 miles of one’s home. While people under 45 get more content online than from any other source, digital ad spending is low and mainly drives online, not offline behavior.  80 percent of online advertising is focused on the 10 percent of total consumer spending that occurs online.

Joe said that the way companies currently try to drive in-store sales is ineffective, based on the zip code concept developed decades ago.

What follows is a synthesis of the NCCBA audience’s lasting impressions from Epperson’s presentation:

1. A technology company that happens to use media.

“We are a technology company that happens to use media, rather than media company that happens to use technology,” declared Epperson.  Joe presented an online “wow” factor, real-time product visualization; demonstrating the enormous scale of the process whereby tens of thousands of impressions were being analyzed each second using MaxPoint. Thereby, he revealed their secret sauce — a unique targeting technology that allows brand owners and retailers to find the right neighborhoods online to drive in-store sales.

Rather than traditional zip code targeting, Joe’s team has developed a more precise “Digital Zip” strategy, which helps them deliver better results.  MaxPoint can do this across the entire country in real time, as he demonstrated. “Hundreds of billions dollars in market value have been generated to bring supply to demand just in time.

But what you see here is a trend that is going to emerge in the next ten years—people have the ability to bring demand to a specific point in just-in time fashion,” Joe stated.  He called this new trend  “real-time demand generation” and stressed his belief in the full potential of online advertising in driving sales. MaxPoint’s customers typically see a 10-20% lift in retail unit sales within hours of deploying their online campaign; their offering has proven to be faster and more effective than traditional promotional methods.

What stuck with many of the attendees I spoke to later is the massive scale of MaxPoint’s cloud: cluster computing that only a few dozen companies in the world have as part of their core business. Right here in the Triangle, MaxPoint is changing the landscape of online advertising, and how demographics are viewed in the digital age.

2. We try anything.

Joe said that if a potential client asked if MaxPoint could do something, he would say “yes”.  He shared a story of how saying yes to a company that everyone in the room had heard of led to catastrophic failure which later became a catalyst for MaxPoint’s success.

Like any start-up story, Maxpoint’s first years did not follow a straight path. “Every great start-up has to have that crucible moment,” Joe said. “When you have those disasters, you can choose to ignore them  or embrace and fix all the way.”

Michael Chen, President of NCCBA and CEO of New Mind Education; Grace Ueng, CEO of Savvy Marketing Group, NCCBA Advisor; Joe Epperson, CEO of MaxPoint.

In the year after Maxpoint was founded, the team worked non-stop all through Thanksgiving and Christmas to fix a system problem, which resulted  in their “home run” the following year. While embracing crisis, Joe also believes in seeking opportunities.

After saying “sure, yes” to his first client when being asked whether he could do it, the “Digital Zip” concept was born. Under his “try anything” philosophy, Joe grasped potential opportunities, and led his team to make the most out of challenges and crises.

3.  Persistence in pitching and serving clients.

The audience wanted advice on how MaxPoint has become successful in having so many customers line up to work with them.  Joe pointed out two keys: one is “persistence”, and the other is “networking”.

Joe told an interesting anecdote about how his persistence opened the door to attain their first Fortune 500 global client. After flying in to meet the decision maker, Joe was told that he no longer had time to meet.

Joe continued to walk boldly into his office, was given  five minutes, and 45 minutes later they had the agreement to conduct a test with the company. After MaxPoint’s technology proved itself, this individual has turned out to be a huge advocate for MaxPoint, recommending the technology to his entire network.

4.  Relentless focus on hiring and inspiring the smartest people.

After Joe and his family decided to move to the East Coast to build MaxPoint, he thought there were two places where he could source top-notch analytics talent, and Boston was just too cold!

Joe focuses on quality of hiring, on securing the smartest folks and fueling their growth. He thinks the greatest thing about smart people is that “they could become intensely smart when you unleash them, when you let them go.” He believes that “the smart people tend to congregate with other smart people.”

Having seen Joe in action leading meetings at MaxPoint, he brings to the Triangle Silicon Valley wisdom. He describes his office as “a Silicon Valley office stuck in Cary” and is proud that “our team is a great team with great energy.” He inspires this energy and draws frequently from his experiences at eBay where he was an instrumental agent of change and worked closely with former CEO, Meg Whitman.

5.  I have a competitor.  I just haven’t seen him yet.

In spite of being a successful entrepreneur, Joe is well grounded in reality when he says that he is paranoid about staying ahead of potential competitors. With its cluster computing and analytics power, Maxpoint is doing something no one else has the capacity to right now.

Joe always has, however, potential competitors in mind, and he is preparing his team to continue to stay ahead. “I actually have a competitor, but I just haven’t seen him yet,” he continues, “That’s one of the things about technology that you always have to assume there is another person out there.”

This assumption fuels Joe and his team to strive for innovation. “I embrace the world in such a way that  whatever I build today will be copied, so we work very hard to constantly innovate.”

6. Global expansion—China: go early, go hard

In working with their global customers that are also large brand owners, Joe shared that 9 out of 10 mention China and emerging markets as where they’d like to see MaxPoint deliver a solution.

“Our biggest expansion would be global,” said Joe. “And we do believe very strongly in international expansion.”  From his eBay experiences, he learned the lesson to  “go international and go early”.  Joe believes that the emerging market such as China is “where the game is still on”.

To build a new standard in China for online advertising is both a huge opportunity and challenge. DoubleClick struggled in China and eBay is not doing well.  Timing is an issue.  And finding the right local partner to gain know-how and build a cross-cultural relationship is also critical.

Outside counsel on how to work with Chinese law and regulation to gain control over consumer data that is of good quality or restricted data required for their analytics modeling  is critical.    Consumers are quite price driven so trade promotions can work. The overall market is more fragmented than the US so understanding of the differences in Tier 1, 2, 3 cities is important for large brand owners.

Editor’s note:
Advisor to the NC Chinese Business Association, Grace Whi-Tze Ueng is founder and chief executive officer of Savvy Marketing Group which advises high potential businesses on how to maximize their chances for success. They recently announced their China practice, helping U.S. companies and investors achieve rapid, sustained success in China.

Tingting Liu and Bryce Roberts contributed to this story.