Swimming Upstream in a Down Economy: Meet John Song
In the latest in a string of successful entrepreneurial ventures for John Song, Alterian acquires Intrepid Consulting
Intrepid (formerly Lift9) was acquired today by Alterian, a global web content management and integrated marketing company.
The acquisition is the latest in a string of successful ventures for Seattle entrepreneur John Song.
Just over a year ago, John founded Lift9, a social media analytics company based in Seattle. While there are quite a few software products that provide social media analytics, software algorithms can’t replace the value of human interpretation of sentiments, language usage and context that provide real insights behind the numbers. Lift9′s solution was to outsource this human element to a world-class research center based in Vietnam, at a fraction of the cost incurred by its competitors.
In February, Lift9 acquired a controlling interest in Intrepid Consulting, an established UK-based ethnographic market research firm with a branch office in Seattle (Free Vector Advisors represented Lift9 in this acquisition). Today, the combined Lift9/Intrepid was acquired by Alterian, a publicly-traded global market research firm, for an undisclosed sum.
Lift9 is but the latest success story that John has been involved with. I first met John in Seoul, Korea, where I was working as foreign legal consultant for a Korean law firm, and John was working with an English-language Korean business magazine. When I left the law firm and returned to the States, I took a job with the Seattle law firm of Bogle & Gates; John was one of only two people I knew in town.
Within a couple of years, I began representing ARIS, a Seattle start-up founded by John’s brother Paul, and later become the company’s General Counsel, working closely with John and Paul as the company acquired a dozen companies in the US and the UK. ARIS was one of the first IT services companies to have an initial public offering, riding the ERP wave and providing consulting and training services on Oracle and Microsoft ERP and database products.
After ARIS, John took a position as CEO with a start-up internet appliance company called Epods (the product prototype could stand in for a 2001 version of Apple’s Ipad, but in retrospect was probably a bit early to market).
After a brief stint at Noetix, the business intelligence software spin-off of ARIS, John founded ZeroDash1, an analytics and optimization consultancy that was acquired within a year (sound familiar?) by Ascentium, an interactive agency based in Seattle. Post‐acquisition, John assumed the role of Managing Partner of Ascentium before founding Lift9 in July of last year.
John’s unique gift is having the vision to see the next most logical extension of the latest hot business trend — the growth in adoption of ERP systems and coupling it with the training inevitably required to educate a company’s employees on how to use and administer those systems (with his brother Paul at ARIS); combining the value of business analytics gained from Noetix with the emergence of web optimization at ZeroDash1; the combination of social media analytics with traditional market research and offshore resourcing at Lift9/Intrepid.
John success lies in iterative innovation, finding the next logical (and lucrative) opportunity by extension. Combine that with outstanding vision, communication, execution and leadership skills, and you have a recipe for success, regardless of the state of the economy.
You can read John’s take on the acquisition on his blog, www.meetjohnsong.com. Congratulations to John and the entire Lift9/Intrepid team on their most recent success!
Bert Sugayan
