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Interview with Elizabeth Cholawsky, HG Data

For this morning's interview, we caught up with Elizabeth Cholawsky, the new CEO of Santa Barbara-based HG Data (www.hgdata.com), which develops software which helps marketers and salespeople understand the "technology stack" of their potential customers and prospects. Cholawsky was most recently CEO of Support.com in the Bay Area, and also was an executive at Citrix Systems.

For those who aren't familiar with HG Data, what does the company do?

Elizabeth Cholawsky: We made our name in what is now thought of as the technographics space. We're a big data company, where we look at all the information available worldwide, including documents, job postings, and anything you can publicly get your hands on, and from that, we distill the technology stack of a company. For example, for any company in the world, we can tell you what they are using for their routers, what their CRM is, whether or not they are using Citrix virtual desktops, whether they use GoToMeeting or Zoom. We distill that information with very high accuracy. It's a bit of a sea-change to be able to get this information like this, as in the past that was a very manual process. Ours is automated, and uses machine learning in the background. Over time, we've now digested over 11 billion documents, and in any one month we're now collecting another 2 billion documents to do updates on the big data set that we have. The business model is people use this to do better marketing and sales targeting when they sell their own products. For example, if I'm a competitor to the Citrix Virtual Desktop software, from Vmware, I might want to know all of the companies who are using Citrix, so I can talk to them about how my products are better, and meet their needs.

How'd you end up at HG Data?

Elizabeth Cholawsky: HG Data is seven years old, and was founded by Craig Harris, who is very much still here. Craig was CEO up until two and a half weeks ago, when I joined. The company has grown very rapidly and well for a startup, but we're now at the point where sales is the name of the game. Craig's passion is developing the product, and getting insights into new and innovative things we can do in the future. My background is more about taking products that are at an early stage, products that need a good shot of adrenaline, and getting to market in a high growth model. I was talking with Craig last October about the company, and where it was, and it really developed into a great match. Craig was thinking about the products and what we could do new, and I really like honing the market for a company so it can scale big and quickly. So, I came on board. My job, for the foreseeable future, is to get us to get into hockey stick growth mode, and inflection point driving.

What were you doing before this?

Elizabeth Cholawsky: My background is I have been in the go-to-market arena for all of my career. I've been in product, product development, marketing, and management. What gets me coming in enthusiastically to work every day, is when I have a product that is growing, and developing in the hands of customers, and our team is making them happy and delighted. I was most recently at a public company, at Support.com, where I was the CEO. That was in the support space, where we were doing outsourced technical services. My initiative at Support.com was to introduce new products into the support space, as a Software-as-a-Service product. I did that, and ramped things up in the three years that I was at Support.com. Prior to that, for seven years I was at Citrix in Santa Barbara, at their SaaS division. I joined Citrix to run the product management for GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, all the way to GoToMyPC, and also ran client service, which included the contact center and the key account managers responsible for retention of the customers. I moved over, halfway in my tenure, to be GM in on the IP support line of the business, which included GoToMyPC and GoToAssist. That was a $250M line of business when I left. Those were the oldest products which had been developed by ExpertCity, which had languished since being bought by Citrix, and I got them back to be vital and growing businesses. That took quite a bit of investment in organic growth and acquisitions. That's what led to the job at Support.com.

So what's your plan to ramp things up at HG Data?

Elizabeth Cholawsky: At HG Data, our data products are out in a number of different forms. We sell directly to big enterprises, like IBM and Cisco. Those are just two examples of the customers we sell directly to. We also have a big presence in the channel, where we do lots of partner marketing in the sales automation space. Last fall, we came out with a product in the Salesforce ecosystem, HG Data for Salesforce. What I am looking to do, is really take all of these offering, and make sure they're tailored to the market as it exists today. We have to match up our sales and marketing systems to drive growth of the product. We have the opportunity to add a stellar enterprise sales capability. We also need to go more mass market. I had a good experience with that at Citrix, where we were able to generate leads and get out and use the Salesforce ecosystem to acquire lots of smaller companies, in addition to the blue chip portfolio we had. So, we'll be focusing on that, and we have many other ideas where we're innovating. For example, I'm working with Craig on a product in the online advertising space called Audience, which uses our data to basically display advertising, and make it much more effective and targeted. The product is in the early stages, but it's really showing huge promise. It's all about matching up the capabilities with go-to-market, and looking at some new ways of selling HG Data.

So why did you decide to come back to Santa Barbara after moving to a company in Silicon Valley?

Elizabeth Cholawsky: I never lost my ties to Santa Barbara. I've been living in Santa Barbara since 1996, and over the course of my career I've gone back and forth to the Bay Area several times. I was evaluating things up there, but I have a core belief that the high tech world in Santa Barbara can really be a vital one. As you know, over time, we've had both spurts of high tech growth and some lulls. When I was getting back in touch with what was going on in Santa Barbara, I started talking with local venture capitalists, to learn who was hot and who was not. It felt to me, that Santa Barbara really is ready to take off with a good core and critical mass of tech companies. That's what attracted me to stay in Santa Barbara. As I learned more and more about HG Data, it was really hard to say no to this opportunity. I hope, as we grow, we become one of the pillars of the community. I had that experience when I was at Citrix in Goleta. At one point, Citrix was the biggest private employer in Santa Barbara. That really takes dedication from the companies. I want to contribute to that.

Thanks!