Lucinda Holt

Company: ClickEquations

Lucinda Holt is an accomplished technology CEO who led a number of successful venture-backed companies. In 2004, Lucinda co-founded and led TurnTide, an anti-spam technology company, which was acquired by Symantec for $28 million in only six months.

Prior to founding TurnTide, Lucinda was President & CEO of Destiny WebSolutions, a venture-backed Inc. 500 winner that provided Internet strategy and implementation consulting to large financial institutions. While growing Destiny from $250,000 to $25 million in revenue Lucinda received many honors. She was named America’s 17th Most Influential Consultant by Consulting Magazine, won the Eastern Technology Council’s Enterprise Award for CEO of the Year, and was an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in Philadelphia. In the last year, Lucinda was named the Iris Newman Award Female Entrepreneur of the Year and an Eisenhower Fellow.

In addition to her CEO roles, Lucinda has been an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at First Round Capital and has held management positions at Infonautics, Automated Call Processing, SEI Investments, and American Express. She graduated cum laude from University of Pennsylvania and earned an MBA from the Wharton School in Entrepreneurial Management.

Tell us about your background and your role at ClickEquations.
ClickEquations is the fourth venture capital-backed company I’ve run, each one in a different market. Since I’m neither a technologist nor a domain expert, I’ve always partnered with a founder who is. That means that my role is about turning a vision into reality – what is the business model? How should we scale? I get the team, the money, and other resources in place and mobilized to achieve the vision.

What are ClickEquations’ main services?
ClickEquations is the first intelligent paid search platform for large advertisers and agencies. Our software-as-a-service platform helps companies increase their profit from paid search advertising.

What makes ClickEquations different from other companies competing in your industry?
ClickEquations has a unique approach to improving paid search campaigns. We believe that technology has to do more to support online marketers. Paid search – and all online marketing – is too complicated and tedious to manage.

Rather than just providing a bunch of features and dumping data on users, ClickEquations layers on intelligence to make managing paid search easier and more profitable. With our advanced analytics and segmentation, users can more clearly understand what’s happening in their accounts. Our built-in best practices make it easier to prioritize and select the most important areas to manage. The powerful bid management and user friendly interface make it easy to execute or automate changes.

ClickEquations is a tool that’s focused on what’s best for businesses, not what’s best for the search engines. The result is that businesses can improve their bottom line in less time.

Tell us more about your firm’s success story.
ClickEquations’ market was extremely crowded when we started, but it has thinned out and we’re one of the handful of companies that the market has identified as a key competitor. We’re particularly proud of achieving that position with a much more efficient use of capital than our nearest competitors.

According to you, what are the most important questions a potential customer should ask a company before choosing a vendor like ClickEquations?
One of the biggest mistakes we see is customers who try to choose a vendor with a big spreadsheet of features to check off. It sounds like a good approach, but it rarely results in the best choice for the marketer – it’s more important that there’s a clear alignment between needs and offering. Also, it’s often the intangibles that make a relationship work, and you can’t judge that with a spreadsheet.

Instead, customers should think deeply about what business problem they’re trying to solve with technology. Are you unable to grow your agency because you’re spending 75% of your time putting together dashboards? Do you struggle to understand where your money’s going and wonder where you should optimize? The best way to buy is to prioritize your challenges and look for tools that can address them effectively.

What are some of the myths in your field?
People believe that technology is a silver bullet. Great technology makes skilled marketers more efficient and effective, but it doesn’t replace them. The future of our industry lies at the intersection of talent and technology, where people drive strategy and analysis and technology simplifies and automates execution.

How do you develop your skills in this continuously changing environment?
Almost every CEO I know is a voracious reader. And I talk with customers, prospects, partners, investors.  One key is constant input.  The other is honest reflection and self-assessment – you need to know what you need to improve and consciously work at it.

What do you see as the future of the industry? What will be the challenges? Do you anticipate any drastic changes?
We think that the entire online marketing market is going to continue to grow and evolve towards search-like models. The most drastic changes are the consumer shift towards social media and the marketers’ shift towards a performance focus. Both of those trends will put tremendous pressure on technology.

Where do you see your firm in the next 5 years? What about you personally?
It is, candidly, highly likely that we’ll be a part of another organization within 5 years. And I’ll continue to be a startup CEO. It’s what I love to do.