RFID Journal - P&G Teams With T3Ci for RFID Apps

one of my portfolio companies, T3Ci, just signed a blockbuster deal to create software applications on top of EPC data streams in partnership with one of their key customers, Proctor & Gamble. I'm posting this both to give them some well deserved recognition but also to highlight why they are being successful.

From day 1 this company has focused on core values rather than market hype. I have rarely seen a team so glued to the notion that everything they do has to result in some immediate customer value. They position themselves as advisors to their customers based on the domain expertise they have developed in CPG and more recently in retail. By understanding how their customers businesses actually work, and indentifying projects that they can deploy RFID/EPC solutions for, they build trust.

I know this all sounds like common sense, and it is really, but to simply leave it at that misses the point that the great majority of enterprise software startups don't do this. Because enterprise software has labored under the notion that unique intellectual property is the foundation upon which your business is built, all too often the interactions with customers begin and end with "this is how you are doing it today, and this is how you should be doing it." I would define T3Ci's intellectual property as the domain expertise they have built through interacting with their customers and understanding how their businesses work, not the investment that has been made in the software assets they have built, and in some cases outright invented.

We invested in T3Ci because they realized that in order to win in this market they were going to have to develop entirely new applications that solved old problems, rather than reengineering  existing solutions. A lot of the RFID deals I looked at were trying to do track-and-trace of assets using this new tagging technology (which ironically wasn't new at all). In the presentations I would rhetorically ask myself the question "big whoop, these guys are building some new feature on a logistics or warehouse app, but what problem are they really solving?". The math didn't add up in most cases, they are expecting customers to spend big $$ on tags, readers, and software only to end up with better visibility and the hope that someone will figure out what to do with that visibility to get some money back.

I could go on and on about this company, but I'll leave it at that because I'm confident there will be a lot of press about them in the months ahead.

Link: RFID Journal - P&G Teams With T3Ci for RFID Apps.

Procter & Gamble has signed a five-year agreement with T3Ci, a Mountain View, Calif.-based startup that has created software for analyzing Electronic Product Code (EPC) data from radio frequency identification systems. The two companies will jointly develop new software applications that take advantage of EPC data throughout the supply chain.

Comments

[Steve]

Sounds great. If PG is following it's practice for strategic relationships, they will want ownership of any IP that is generated. So you get them as a customer, you focus less on IP (at least that's the way I read their strategic partnership NDA). So I take the disclaimer re: IP over-focus as SOP for developers with a grain of salt or two.

[joe blow]

Exactly. P&G owning the IP is how they killed Bios Group, and n other startups where P&G has leveraged their brand to get substantial pricing discounts and solution IP ownership. Smart company. T3ci won't be far behind Bios Group's demise. Funny how Jeff comments on visibility. All T3ci is doing is downloading clients' RFID data in Excel, analyzing it, then presenting historical analysis to clients over the phone once a week. Then, when clients like Unilever realized they could get the same data from Retail Link, they cancelled their pilot with T3ci. Other T3ci customers will realize this soon enough.

[jeff]

"Joe",
You are factually inaccurate across the board.

I traced you IP back to Charter... Boston? Oat perhaps?