Jeremiah: The following is a cross posting of our Founder’s blog post on the Altimeter’s blog. I shared her sentiments completely, and am not sure if I could add anything, so I felt it was just best to repost here. Later, at another time, I’ll discuss the learnings from starting a company from scratch, and how I feel it’s helped me to better service my clients. I feel that I’m more complete as a professional and analyst after launching a business. Here’s Charlene:
Charlene Li: One year ago, Altimeter announced the addition of three partners – Jeremiah Owyang, Deb Schultz, and Ray Wang – turning what was up to then a one-woman shop into a company. We moved into small offices (affectionately named “The Hangar), made a trek to Ikea to buy furniture, had a rock-and-rolling kick off party, and got down to business.
In those early days, we were filled with optimism even though we were starting in the grips of the deepest recession in memory. That’s because we believed in our mission of helping clients create a strategic approach to emerging technologies — no matter what the economy threw at us, we saw the pain and confusion cause by new technologies and believed in our ability to make sense of these developments for our clients.
But as we worked with clients, we realized we needed more expertise so we added in quick succession four more partners – Alan Webber, Lora Cecere, Michael Gartenberg, and Marcia Conner – who represent a wide and diverse background, ranging from government and supply chain to mobile, and enterprise collaboration. And along the way, we’ve also added nine amazing staff members who not only help us create groundbreaking research and serve clients, but also make sure that we operate and execute well. With a total of 17 people and 11 based in San Mateo, we had to move into new offices in March. I can’t say thank you enough to all my colleagues who believed enough in Altimeter to leave their jobs and join a start-up.
All of this growth wouldn’t have been possible without our clients. In the past year, 109 companies put their trust in our new firm to help them with their toughest strategic and technology problems. We’ve flown all over the country and the world to meet with them, because even in a world transformed by new communication technologies, there’s no substitute for meeting people face to face when they’re dealing with tough, strategic problems. We thank them from the bottom of our hearts for not only the opportunity to work with them, but also because we’ve learned so much from them in the process.
We’ve delivered to our clients with speeches, workshops, advisory projects, and Webinars and we’ve published a slew of original research reports (SCRM, analytics, Facebook marketing) through our blogs, giving it away for free instead of putting it behind a syndication pay wall. We launched a bestseller book (“Open Leadership“) with another book by Marcia Conner on the way (“The New Social Learning“). We also announced our first event, the Rise of Social Commerce (taking place Oct. 6th in Silicon Valley – you should come!).
Looking back over the year, my partners and I are grateful that we’ve been able to accomplish so much. And we didn’t do it by ourselves. At our side has always been a broad community of peers and clients, readers and followers, commenters and critics. Throughout the adventure of our inaugural year, you’ve always been there for us, cheering us on, telling us when we could do better, and supporting us when we stumbled. Your time and attention is precious, and we are both grateful and humbled that you choose to spend some of it with us.
So thank you for joining us on this journey, and we hope you’ll continue with us on this adventure.
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Happy Anniversary! What a year it's been. Congratulations for not only surviving in this economy, but thriving as well. I've nothing but respect for the Altimeter Group.
Thank you Scott!