Sustainable Consumptions-Free-Samples for Students-Myassignment

Question: Talk about the Marketers are not doing what's needed in coordinating their Target Markets towards Sustainable Consumptions. Answer: The exceptional culmination present in the cutting edge world has made it fundamental for all associations to create smooth advertising methods to satisfy the requirements of clients. ID of the necessities of clients, and accepting changes in the promoting procedure directly affects the productivity of associations. Regardless of the need to expand client mindfulness about the utilization of economical items, advertisers have veered off to different bearings. The current paper centers around the significance of driving targets markets towards the utilization of reasonable items. Armstrong et al. (2015) expressed that it is the domain of all associations to showcase their items so as to accomplish advertise maintainability. Be that as it may, the nonappearance of a comprehension among the administration and the advertising divisions prompts non-improvement of reasonable advancement. The utilization of maintainable items has now begun to turn into a reality. The general public has gotten progressively hesitant to utilize fake items. Nonetheless, Brindley Oxborrow (2014) contended that it isn't feasible for the advertisers to deviate themselves from their working strategy of offering these items to the shoppers as it implies changing the entire tree. Advertising the items is the last line of the total authoritative tree. So as to do as such, there should be a noteworthy change in the authoritative arrangements and procedures beginning from their assembling. According to the perspective of Rodrguez-Priego Montoro-Ros, most associations would prefer not to pull b ack their current items from the market, which are not supportable enough. This makes it fundamental for the advertisers to include push showcasing to ensure that are items are sold on schedule. Maintainability is measured by the general public in a few different ways. Advertisers are not concentrating on giving consciousness of supportability while marking of the items. The advertisers don't feature the prodicts, which are made of ecological benevolent fixings. Van Herpen et al. (2015) remarked that the formation of item request from the advertisers end is principally founded on the past item changes that have been given. Notwithstanding that, the arrangement to sponsorships and motivations assume a significant job in catching the consideration of general society. The arrangement of critical motivators and limits on economical items can help in creating better interest from the buyers, who might then have the option to start deals of more items. Notwithstanding, Biswas Roy (2015) contended that advertisers have for the most part centered around driving their techniques dependent on the cost of the items and not the maintainability. Satisfying the requirements of value has b een a need for the advertisers, however their methodology has been extraordinary. Regardless of the nearness of solid showcasing divisions, the associations are veering off their systems and concentrating more on their business perspective. There are a few different ways to accomplish the consideration of purchasers to pick up showcase maintainability. Numerous worldwide organizations, for example, grocery store fasten ALDI have begun to advertise the items sold by making another reasonable items area. In any case, the initial step for the advertisers is to comprehend the interest of the objective market. So as to ensure that the item can be sold, input should be taken from the customers. This input can be gotten utilizing open criticism structure or holding of classes with the general population. From the perspective of Olsen et al. (2014), the perspective on general society is significant as in spite of the progressions realized by the advertisers, not many people move from their unique view. Checking the necessities of the objective showcasing and changing the discernment is a procedure that takes a great deal of time. Expanding request among the objective market with respect to maintainable items must be accomplishe d when there is a solid diagram of the items that are being sold. The nonappearance of item illustrating outcomes in the repression of the possibility of manageability of items. The upsurges of items in the ongoing time, which hotshot maintainable assembling, have various costs. Numerous nations like Sweden and Denmark have begun to give lower charge rates to the organizations. Advertisers are anyway still not ready to settle the issue. They are as yet stuck on the various needs of the buyers and can't veer them off towards their own decision. Fortune of better manageability and expanding their interest in the objective markets is certifiably not an uneven methodology. It is significant for the total authoritative chain to cooperate and offer better types of assistance to the general population. Expanded mindfulness about supportable items must be coordinated with forceful valuing so the clients can comprehend the need of purchasing. Holding classes and meetings consistently to gather the criticism of the objective market is additionally significant with the goal that legitimate changes should be possible in the product offering. In this way, it is critical to achieve a change in both the bureaucratic just as the on ground showcasing group so as to look for a superior world later on. Reference List Armstrong, G., Kotler, P., Harker, M., Brennan, R. (2015).Marketing: a presentation. Pearson Education. Biswas, A., Roy, M. (2015). Green items: an exploratory examination on the purchaser conduct in developing economies of the East.Journal of Cleaner Production,87, 463-468. Brindley, C., Oxborrow, L. (2014). Adjusting the economical flexibly chain to green advertising needs: A case study.Industrial Marketing Management,43(1), 45-55. Olsen, M. C., Slotegraaf, R. J., Chandukala, S. R. (2014). Green cases and message outlines: how green new items change brand attitude.Journal of Marketing,78(5), 119-137. Rodrguez-Priego, N., Montoro-Ros, F. J. (2018). How Cultural Beliefs and the Response to Fear Appeals Shape Consumers Purchasing Behavior Toward Sustainable Products. InSustainability in Innovation and Entrepreneurship(pp. 47-62). Springer, Cham. Van Herpen, E., Fischer, A. R., van Trijp, H. C. (2015). The most effective method to position gently sustainableproducts: The joint effect of arrangement show and value setting.Food Quality and Preference,46, 26-32.

Macbeth Essays (670 words) - Characters In Macbeth,

Macbeth In Shakespeare's disaster, Macbeth, the characters and the jobs they play are basic to its plot and topic, and in this way huge numbers of Shakespeare's characters are very much evolved and complex. Two of these characters are the hero, Macbeth, and his significant other, Lady Macbeth. They assume intriguing jobs with regards to the disaster, also, through the span of the play, their relationship changes and their jobs are basically exchanged. Toward the start of the play, they treat each other as approaches. They have incredible worry for one another, as represented when Macbeth races to disclose to Lady Macbeth the report about the witches and she promptly starts plotting how to pick up for her better half his longing to be the best. Now, Lady Macbeth is the unfaltering, resilient lady, while Macbeth is depicted as her uncertain, fainthearted spouse. He has desire, however now, his still, small voice is more grounded than that aspiration. Woman Macbeth clarifies this normal for her significant other in Act I, Scene v, when she says, Yet do I dread thy nature; it is too full o' th' milk of human thoughtfulness to get the closest way. The following phase of progress creating in the characters of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth is in Act II. This is the demonstration wherein Macbeth executes Lord Duncan. Macbeth's character change is clear since clearly he has surrendered to his desire and has killed the ruler. He isn't completely changed, however, on the grounds that he is practically ridiculous after he has submitted the wrongdoing. He shouts, Will all incredible Neptune's sea wash this blood clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather the incalculable oceans incarnadine, making the green one red. He accepts that rather than the sea cleaning his hands, his hands would turn the sea red. Macbeth's job has changed to some degree yet not so much, since he has carried out the wrongdoing however his soul is as yet evident after the homicide. Woman Macbeth's job likewise changes fairly in Act II. The peruser sees a break in her solid character when she tells Macbeth in Scene ii of Act II that she would have killed Duncan herself in the event that he had not taken after her dad as he rested. Her intensity is as yet clear, however, when she quiets Macbeth after the homicide and accepts a little water frees us from this deed. Unlike the jobs of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, their relationship stays unaltered from Act I to II. Their relationship is still close as observed through Duncan's homicide - a result of cooperation. At the end of Act III, both the jobs and the relationship of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have arrived at the last phase of their change. Since Duncan is dead and Macbeth is pitifully made a beeline for an existence of indecency, Lady Macbeth blurs out of spotlight. Macbeth takes it upon himself in Act III to plot Banquo's murder without talking with his significant other in light of the fact that he needs to shield her from the debasement that he has included himself with. His job is currently totally changed what's more, there is no turning around for him. As Macbeth goes off on his own course during this time, Lady Macbeth's blame is overpowering and, cut off from him, she slips into frenzy. Her blame rises in Act III, Scene ii when she says she would prefer to be dead, and it develops from that point on until her demise. Woman Macbeth's character change is likewise clear in Act III, Scene ii when she backs out of Macbeth's puzzling homicide plan and lets him know, You should leave this. The connection between the couple is being destroyed at this point in Macbeth. They are going in independent ways - Macbeth towards an existence of underhandedness and Lady Macbeth towards madness and sorrow. As Shakespeare built up the characters of Macbeth and his better half, their switching jobs unexpectedly wound up taking after the other one's job. Toward the start of the catastrophe, Macbeth was the reluctant character with a solid inner voice, while Lady Macbeth was ground-breaking what's more, firm. Be that as it may, when these two characters were totally changed, Macbeth wound up being unequivocal and avaricious, as Lady Macbeth ended up being feeble since her feeling of remorse made her crazy. Shakespeare's trade of jobs in Macbeth is sharp yet bizarre, however all things considered, things aren't continuously what they appear.

Ensighten

Ensighten INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are in San Jose in the Ensighten office. Hi, Josh. Who are you and what are you doing?Josh: Well, I am Josh Manion the CEO and founder of Ensighten. We are a digital marketing company that is really trying to transform the way that large enterprises collect, own and act all the digital data that they have about their customers. So anything from their website, to their mobile apps, to their display ads, social media. We have been at it for just over five years now.BUSINESS MODEL OF ENSIGHTENMartin: What did you do before and what made you come up with the business idea of Ensighten?Josh: If you think about what I was doing for, I guess, seven to eight years before starting Ensighten I was running the digital analytics agency. My wife and I had started this company and it was based in Chicago. We generally work with big enterprise customers, so sort of a similar customer overlapped what we have now. And to me, there was just this growing opportunity th at existed and I’ll sort of describe that dynamics that revealed it to me, which was, we would watch these large enterprises go from working with anywhere from when we first started that digital analytics agency, probably two or three different marketing technology, ad tech vendors, and this was sort of like 2002 time period, theyd only have a small handful of those. And then by the time when we started Ensighten, there were certainly dozens and dozens of those per enterprises and in some cases hundreds depending on the size and business model of a particular enterprise they we were working with. And what I observed was that the enterprise was getting value, they were creating a positive ROI of all the initiatives that they were pursuing with these vendors. But what they were not doing was keeping up with the potential value of what they were creating. So if you think of it like moving from three vendors to 30 vendors, you would have this exponential explosion and sort of the pote ntial value of what you could get out of those solutions, but instead they would just have a tiny little linear increase of “Ok, what were getting more out but nowhere near what the potential value was.”To me, it seemed like there were two big issues that existed that were stopping them:The first was this concept of marketing agility. So if a marketer wants to do something but maybe it’s to collect a piece of data, maybe its launching a campaign, maybe it’s to try out a new vendor, whatever it might be, they literally couldnt do it. They would sit there and they would go to their IT department and they would say “Hey, can you put this little piece of code on all of my different pages,” and IT department said, “But you have hundreds of thousands of these little different pages thats going to take months to do”. And the marketer would respond with something like, “But that doesnt work because the campaigns launching in three days.” And so they would respond with, â €œWell, youre not going to get that data done,” or whatever the scenario would be. Essentially they were continually bottlenecked by their own processes and systems that didnt give the marketers the ability to keep up with what the customer was expecting.The second issue was the data itself. So if you think about working with, I don’t know if you guys are familiar with LUMAscape, it is like this eye chart that has 2,000 vendors on it. It literally maps the growth of the digital marketing ecosystem and sort of the ad tech ecosystem over the years. So they put everybody in these tiny little categories and shrink those down. Its completely overwhelming, but what you find that’s common about those thousands of vendors that are on there is that they own all of the data that those enterprises are collecting. So the enterprise would essentially engage in this model that would say, “We reached out to you as a vendor, let me pay you to put your code on my site then you would collect my data, but you would collect it in a format that the first party to you and third-party to me which makes it virtually impossible for me to join it with any other data. And if I ever need that data, youre probably going to rent or sell it back to me.” And it was really rather crazy if you think about it from just with a beginners mind. But that was what everyone was used to, that was how I had servers working so that was just sort of the standard that expanded.So that phenomenon of creating all of these different silos so if I stick with that example or that you have thirty different vendors on your site, those 30 vendors now have created at least, and sometimes more than 30 different silos of data. So your ad server will have one view of who that customer is; your website analytics tool have another; your mobile analytics tool will probably have another; your personalization engine will have another. And what you create is this concept of never knowing who your customer is, or you are always treating them as if you either dont know them or you know different random facts about them. So you provide very choppy sort of user experiences as they I guess progress through this journey of either learning about your company, becoming a customer, becoming a repeat customer, optimizing lifetime value with a customer, etc.So the opportunity in my mind was to solve that by essentially giving the enterprise one consistent view of who that customer is, that was first party to them, that was completely owned by them and that would be actionable for all of those vendors to seamlessly plug into. And so when you really boil down what were doing in the space are the two things that disrupt the space most:We are taking that action ability or that agility platform that was first described, we are creating an environment where the marketer can just drag-and-drop something and collect any piece of data, try out a new vendor but without any involvement from there IT Department, their developers, etc. so it can literally happen in minutes now instead of weeks or months, whatever it used to take;And then the second piece is were allowing them to create this data profile that is truly you know encompasses the entire journey of the visitor. And when you combine those things together what you do is you create a network effect for the enterprise themselves that says, Well, if I work with 30 vendors now using a platform like Ensighten actually makes all 30 of those vendors more powerful because theyre able to access a unified profile so theyre all able to make a slightly smarter decision on each interaction. And we do other things; we make them faster, make them easier to manage and theres less overhead and sort of having a number of vendors that exist on the site.So if you are an enterprise you have to have a very strong incentive, start working with vendor number 31 because the original thirty get better when you bring the number 31 or 32, or so on. And so that really just sort of stems from that consulting work that were doing at those digital analytics agency for the seven years prior. When I saw that I was shocked that no one else was doing, it was sort of like it came to me and started doing a bunch of research and they were there are people kind of poking around the edges of it but there was no one was really taking that vision to the market the way that I wanted to. And so I spun out of that company and you know the rest is history.Martin: Josh, how does it work? Imagine, I install this kind of simplified the tag manager in my company. So I have 30 vendors who Im plugging into. How do you join the data then from those vendors?Josh: So it starts with the implementation of the tag management system itself. On the back of the card is the implementation guide itself, so single line of code and one of the core requirements that we had from the onset was the implementation of our platform has to eliminate the complexity that is traditiona lly existed where it would be, “I want to implement a web analytics tool” and it would take months of complexity to configure it customize it, capture all the events and custom variables that you want to capture. And so that single line of code never changes for the client, once they put it there theyre able to take any net new vendor and essentially just take them out of our library, we have over a thousand vendors in our in our app library, and literally just drag them onto the site put in their user ID and password and configure them.Now, for vendors that are already on their site, this is actually the hardest part of the I usually describe it this way; you’re implemented the moment you put the line of code on the site and most of our customers start doing net new things immediately. United Airlines was an example of this, they first started working with us right after they merge with Continental, they had a list of 12 things that they wanted to deploy on the new combined w ebsite. Ensighten came up as a part of that new platform of the combined company and they realized that once they put the line of code on the site, those twelve new vendors they were done it in less than a month and they plan the entire year to do it. And that was a great example of sort of the agility that they can sort of generate from being able to just do any forward-looking things immediately.Now the harder part of this is generally when you have an existing site and want to take, let’s say, youre taking 10 vendors off that site and you want to redeploy them, the redeployment is actually very easy. The hardest part of this process, not surprisingly given sort of the legacy and sort of the challenge of trying to get away from, is you need to have your IT department to go in and actually remove them. And so taking the code off the pages and many of our customers actually will delay that because it’s a traditional IT project and so they say, “Well you know it next time we re fresh the site I’ll get it off but just start managing that thing. And so we can manage the code is already there, it wont be quite as performance optimized as it would be if it was flowing into our system but it allows the customer to get immediate value out of it.Martin: Josh, you actually said that you change the paradigm from having a third-party data to really owning the data as a customer. Imagine, Ive implemented the tag manager I have something like Google analytics on there, are you able to push me in real time raw data of what the customers doing on my website?Josh: Absolutely and thanks for reminding because I didn’t answer your full question before, which was: if you think about how we are changing the data paradigm, now when a customer who wants to own that data asset what theyre effectively doing is theyre creating their own copy specific to that individual on that if you stick with United Airlines example, Microsoft or Sony or American Express or anywhere custome rs, what you end up with is they will take and start creating their own first-party, key to a first-party cookie that is only accessible to them and they will start collecting the superset of all the data that goes. So in your example the data that goes to Google Analytics they’ll also choose to collect that. If theyre using voice of customer solution like opinion lab they’ll also collect that data, if theyre using a personalization engine they’ll collect whether or not test A versus test B was working for this particular visitor or what segment they are in, etc.Absolutely we can provide that data in real-time to them and a number of our customers like actually there was just an article and ad exchanger about Coke and how they use our platform to do exactly that use case whether collecting all of that data. And their model has been to not work with a traditional web analytics tool but to feed all of that data as a real-time stream into their enterprise data warehouse where the y apply all the sophisticated BI tools that they have against that data for the modeling and data science teams that they have there.But the important element here is thatâ€" and sometimes I show this was the first time your prospect of actually kind of short chart that shows like imagine the customer views an ad. In that world the ad server once you double click will have a data point about that customers. You viewed it out maybe you clicked on maybe you didn’t. In our world, Ensighten would also have a copy of that or the customer take a Coke would have that same piece of data. Now something happens on the website, now double-click wont have any view of that, this would be let’s say web trans, whatever the web analytics tool was. Well web trans will have one data piece, while Ensighten will have another data piece, so now we have two data pieces, and you have two systems with one data pieces and you can sort of extend that down through, “Ok now Im interactive the mobile app , I’m on a social media platform Im doing all of these things.” And it starts to become very clear that Ensighten has the master dataset where all of these other data sets are just as little fragments of, “ok, this is one channels interaction, this is one media type or this is only things on my own properties or these are only things on purchased or paid media”.Martin: Do you also provide analytic tools based on your Ensighten stuff or is it only that you are collecting other data and then pumping the data to your customer?Josh: So, we actually do both. So, philosophically we are very committed to the idea that our platform and the data needs to be open so our customers can connect any third-party vendor they want to that and they can extract that at any level of granularity whether it was like the Coke example of a real-time stream of that data coming out or they want to batch exports, whatever might be. So thats philosophically very important but we very quickly kind of le arned that our customers, of course now have this really rich dataset, they want to have Ensighten and they want to be able to immediately explore without taking it out of the platform and sort of taking on additional work.So we actually did an acquisition in 2014 where we acquired a omnichannel data analytics platform and mainly because of this specific use case. We had this tremendously differentiated dataset and we wanted to rapidly accelerate our customers’ ability to explore and model that data and do omnichannel data analysis and segmentation of their customers. So we have a solution on that side as well.Martin: Josh, you’re actually supporting thousands of vendors for the platform. When you started out, you didnt support that many, but what the first three or six months look like? How did you start billing the product and finding customers?Josh: Vendor support first. We actually started with four key requirements with the system.One was this one line of code that I refere nced earlier.Second was that we had to support every vendor completely natively whether they existed today or they would exist in the future with no modification.Number three was we had to work in every digital touch-point, so it wasnt just the web tool, it we had to work in mobile and had to work alternative things, had to work with any of these emerging devices; ATM machines, whatever it could be.And the number four was it had to make all of those experiences faster. It had to be a better customer experience, if you uploaded that code here it would load faster, drive a better customer experience.So the way we got that was we were not forcing any vendor to modify themselves at all, we were able to just sort of natively support and takeâ€" even though we didnt have fancy apps like we do now at our app marketplace, partnerships with all of these guys. We were able to literally create an environment where someone could cut and paste the solutions and say, “I want to run this version of this vendor”, cut and paste, boom, it’s done and so very easy.Now the question about how did we get started, I think we had a little bit of an advantage because coming from that digital analytics agency I knew a lot of enterprise customers and I had at least enough credibility with those customers and sort of a reputation in the space when I would call someone up at one of these big enterprises they wouldn’t just slap the phone down. Because I used to have these conversations that would go something like this and say “If I could replace all the tags on your site with a single line of code, it would make your site faster you would never have to talk to your IT department again would you be interested?” And they would be like, “Of course but you dont have something that does that.” And I’d be like, “But no I do”. And they’re like “Well you never lied to me before. So Come on in and I’ll at least look at demo.”And that was literally how we got our first handfull of customers which were people like Nestle Purina, Paramount investments, Sony Electronics, etc. So we were fortunate and being able to acquire those first handful customers in our first few months of operation. And we took a slightly different sort of path than a lot of others Silicon Valley startups. That wasnt go, come up with the idea, go up and down in Sand Hill road, raise a bunch of money and then spend a year building product and then go to market. We did it completely backwards.So we went to recognize the need and the problem and started bootstrapping the company based on the success of the prior company which was a luxury and then as soon as we had an initial version of the product we were also fortunate that we were able to pretty easily attract people and say, Would you help us beta test this and validate whether it works? Does it really solve the problem we say it does and what else would you like to see in it? And so when the company started which was official ly incorporated on the last day of 2009, by February of 2010 we were literally closing our first paying customers which were generally people coming out of that beta program that we were working with.Martin: As you have a lot of B2B customers and especially bigger ones and, from my understanding is they having much longer sales cycles, how did you solve this kind of problem? Because when you are starting out you are kind of cash constraintJosh: That was a challenging thing for us for sure because we had this initial excitement when we launched the product when we closed our first half dozen customers in the first few months. And myself and other early folks here thought okay well that was just going to take off if we justâ€" were going to really make this huge. And then all of a sudden it was like it just we didnt sell again for like two quarters. We had lots of demos and lots of prospects we just did not get people weren’t signing contracts.Part of it is exactly the enterprise sa les cycles are long one. Part of it was just the adoption cycle of a new technology we were in a category that really didnt exist before, people didnt have budget set aside for tag management or this sort of digital marketing platform optimization in this way, and so they would see the demo and say “Wow, that’s awesome. I want it. But I don’t have any money, I dont know how I would get this maybe Ill ask for it next year.” That kind of discussion would go on.So it was really about six months we were just struggling, just closing 1-2 customers through that period of time and then all of a sudden the market started to mature to the point where those early customers that we had were starting to have great success and have phenomenal ROI stories that made it easier to sell the other ones. It just started to become a little bit more mainstream people say “Okay, I know somebody whos done that whos had experience with it.” We started to get some of our early customers onto the speaking circuit within sort of the industry trade shows and so on, so they were publicizing and helping us publicize. There was just sort of that intangible timing element which is so tricky when you’re doing a startup because you’re going to have the best idea and if you’re timing is just off you can blow through your cash just be done. But yes, that was definitely a challenge for us because we werent sure when the market would truly sort of mature and be ready for it.Martin: Josh, I totally understand the advantage of using tag management like Ensighten, only single line of codes and you join lots of data sources, totally get it. But what are the downsides of using something like this? I don’t know, maybe page load speed, performance?Josh: Well, the page load speed actually accelerates. It accelerates for a few reasons:One we can deploy specialized infrastructure to serve these little chunks of code which if you think about what most websites serve their content through itll be through CDN like an Akamai which is optimized for big files; images, videos, etc. And so the underlying files of these tags and these vendors tend to be these really small 2, 3, 4 kilobytes of little JavaScript files. And so what you would do to optimize your infrastructure to serve those is quite different than what you would do to optimize for big video and image files, so that’s one.The second is that we can control how they load so we can as opposed to loading the mall synchronously and say you wait until theyre all, which is how some poorly implemented sites would affect were able to dynamically insert them just the right place in the sites so that the site becomes interactive and that it becomes functional much sooner that would have otherwise.And then the third piece is if you think about a high complexity site, a site somebody whos got fifty tags or more most of those tags literally dont apply to every visitor, they apply to some of the visitors. So if youre coming from this campaign but run this code but I might have done twenty times in there. So any one visitor will only have one of those twenty tags actually be applicable to them. In the old world, all 20 would run, all twenty would collect that visitor’s data which is a privacy issue even though its irrelevant to them. In our world, Ensighten would actually dynamically decide, Hey, this visitor has only this piece is relevant to them and so in that case youd actually save 95% to load because we would only bring down the tag that needs to run for that one individual and so the other nineteen tags literally dont even need to download or execute for that visitor. For the next one it might be a different one but its able to essentially personalize which tags go until you can take a huge amount of the payload that needs to both be downloaded and the burden you put on the browser in terms of processing that code and actually executing it.So the downside case is honestly I would say its there really isnt a strong one in the sense of like The value proposition is sort of so self-evident, its very similar to content management in the sense that you would generally not want to start running a website without a platform like this, it just doesnt make sense to do this stuff by hand. If you were going to dig deep for downside case youd say well IT’s giving up control just like they would do the content management system someone could post a piece of inappropriate content or in this case they could literally do something without the appropriate sort of guard rails in place and we invest heavily to create those guard rails for people but no matter what you do somebody could potentially hurt themselves with it or break a site or launch something that interferes with some of other piece of functionality on site if there isnt the appropriate workflow and sort of testing in place. And thats the biggest objection that we typically hear is that IT and security, in particular financ ial services, they really want to make sure that theres a really enterprise-class solution in place that has security workflows, permissioning, that the data is secure because what were really talking about is a sensitive asset for global enterprise or any of our European customers in particular that can be very sensitive topic.Martin: How do you go about this safe harbor topic because, for example, for European customers?Josh: You mean in terms of storage of their data? So for European customers who want to take advantage of that universal profile, then that data will literally be stored in European data centers and not allowed to transport back to North America which is little bit more challenging from an infrastructure standpoint but again I think one of the reasons that you want to go with a real enterprise-class vendor in the space as opposed to some of the smaller guys that are out there.Martin: Josh, how’s the revenue model working and how did you decide about the pricing?J osh: The revenue model is pretty traditional SaaS based software, so it is generally an annual subscription to our service. And thats like any of the SaaS based technologies out there so you just sign up for a year, two or three years depending on how long you want commit and how big discount you want to get. Generally that is also based on the volume of transactions that you have; going on so how frequently are you interacting with our platform. If youre used to buy web analytics tool it’ll generally be the same kind of model, I used to buy a billion pages from my site then I would buy a billion server calls from Ensighten to help support that because generally each interaction would going to be responding with heres a customized for this visitor in these tags that apply to them.Let’s see, the pricing and how we started with it. I think anytime youre starting out its very hard to figure out what is the value to your customer and you generally have very little idea what your own costs are you going to deliver because you are very early stages, you are not at scale. You are losing money no matter what you charge. Its tricky. We actually started with the domain based pricing models so trying to say that people could put it all over their domain and it wasnt server call based, that turned out to be a little bit cumbersome for some of our big clients. So as we started to work with really big organizations like Microsoft they would say well thats great but it kind ofâ€" heres an example with our store where we have a hundred domains across hundred different countries and that kind of works for you but then if we go and put you on microsoft.com and thats one domain and its billions and billions of requests that kind of works for us. Now, when I want to get kind of balances out in a customer like that so its not that big of a deal but they were actually the one that helped drive us to the decision to move to server call base pricing because they were much more ab le to allocate costs across different business units and so they would buy large quantity and then allocate across many different business units. So they found that model made it a lot easier than domain based that might have a small group consuming a very little amount of traffic but for a lot of domains that was not necessarily good.Martin: And for the pricing, did you rather use the cost based pricing, value based pricing or just by looking at competitive pricing?Josh: So when we started there really wasnt a competitive example. There was actually a company in Europe called TagMan who we bought last year in 2014, but we werent seeing them in a lot of the North American deals when we were just starting. So our primary goal was to try to find a value based price that worked which was associated with the value of the customers paid and where I think we ultimately ended up was that you tended to be a combination of value-based pricing but also so correlating based on what other guys in the marketing tag stack were charging and what people were used to. So if they were used to pay $100,000 a year for solution then they might be equally happy to pay $100,000 for ours but they would have paid $200,000. So it was that sort of tweaking the model that took place in the first couple years.Martin: And Josh, you said that especially in the beginning you dont have a good idea of how the cost functions working, how the revenue functions working. How often did you need to adjust the pricing model?Josh: We tried not to adjust it that often because it was tricky in that first say five customers. It got adjusted a lot because we were youre not really even sure if youre in the right ballpark and youre trying to calibrate your customers are telling you whats appropriate what they feel good about and you want to be in that zone where they feel really good theyre getting a really strong ROI but its also you know when you start dropping that in your models you say, “Okay, I can see how that will work for me It’s not like I’m going to charge you $10 a month.”ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEUR FROM JOSH MANION In San Jose (CA), we meet CEO Founder of Ensighten, Josh Manion. Josh talks about his story how he came up with the idea and founded Ensighten, how the current business model works, as well as he provides some advice for young entrepreneurs.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are in San Jose in the Ensighten office. Hi, Josh. Who are you and what are you doing?Josh: Well, I am Josh Manion the CEO and founder of Ensighten. We are a digital marketing company that is really trying to transform the way that large enterprises collect, own and act all the digital data that they have about their customers. So anything from their website, to their mobile apps, to their display ads, social media. We have been at it for just over five years now.BUSINESS MODEL OF ENSIGHTENMartin: What did you do before and what made you come up with the business idea of Ensighten?Josh: If you think about what I was doing for, I guess, seven to eight years before starting Ensighten I was running the digital analy tics agency. My wife and I had started this company and it was based in Chicago. We generally work with big enterprise customers, so sort of a similar customer overlapped what we have now. And to me, there was just this growing opportunity that existed and I’ll sort of describe that dynamics that revealed it to me, which was, we would watch these large enterprises go from working with anywhere from when we first started that digital analytics agency, probably two or three different marketing technology, ad tech vendors, and this was sort of like 2002 time period, theyd only have a small handful of those. And then by the time when we started Ensighten, there were certainly dozens and dozens of those per enterprises and in some cases hundreds depending on the size and business model of a particular enterprise they we were working with. And what I observed was that the enterprise was getting value, they were creating a positive ROI of all the initiatives that they were pursuing with these vendors. But what they were not doing was keeping up with the potential value of what they were creating. So if you think of it like moving from three vendors to 30 vendors, you would have this exponential explosion and sort of the potential value of what you could get out of those solutions, but instead they would just have a tiny little linear increase of “Ok, what were getting more out but nowhere near what the potential value was.”To me, it seemed like there were two big issues that existed that were stopping them:The first was this concept of marketing agility. So if a marketer wants to do something but maybe it’s to collect a piece of data, maybe its launching a campaign, maybe it’s to try out a new vendor, whatever it might be, they literally couldnt do it. They would sit there and they would go to their IT department and they would say “Hey, can you put this little piece of code on all of my different pages,” and IT department said, “But you have hundreds of thousands of these little different pages thats going to take months to do”. And the marketer would respond with something like, “But that doesnt work because the campaigns launching in three days.” And so they would respond with, “Well, youre not going to get that data done,” or whatever the scenario would be. Essentially they were continually bottlenecked by their own processes and systems that didnt give the marketers the ability to keep up with what the customer was expecting.The second issue was the data itself. So if you think about working with, I don’t know if you guys are familiar with LUMAscape, it is like this eye chart that has 2,000 vendors on it. It literally maps the growth of the digital marketing ecosystem and sort of the ad tech ecosystem over the years. So they put everybody in these tiny little categories and shrink those down. Its completely overwhelming, but what you find that’s common about those thousands of vendors that are on there is that they own all of the data that those enterprises are collecting. So the enterprise would essentially engage in this model that would say, “We reached out to you as a vendor, let me pay you to put your code on my site then you would collect my data, but you would collect it in a format that the first party to you and third-party to me which makes it virtually impossible for me to join it with any other data. And if I ever need that data, youre probably going to rent or sell it back to me.” And it was really rather crazy if you think about it from just with a beginners mind. But that was what everyone was used to, that was how I had servers working so that was just sort of the standard that expanded.So that phenomenon of creating all of these different silos so if I stick with that example or that you have thirty different vendors on your site, those 30 vendors now have created at least, and sometimes more than 30 different silos of data. So your ad server will have one view of wh o that customer is; your website analytics tool have another; your mobile analytics tool will probably have another; your personalization engine will have another. And what you create is this concept of never knowing who your customer is, or you are always treating them as if you either dont know them or you know different random facts about them. So you provide very choppy sort of user experiences as they I guess progress through this journey of either learning about your company, becoming a customer, becoming a repeat customer, optimizing lifetime value with a customer, etc.So the opportunity in my mind was to solve that by essentially giving the enterprise one consistent view of who that customer is, that was first party to them, that was completely owned by them and that would be actionable for all of those vendors to seamlessly plug into. And so when you really boil down what were doing in the space are the two things that disrupt the space most:We are taking that action abilit y or that agility platform that was first described, we are creating an environment where the marketer can just drag-and-drop something and collect any piece of data, try out a new vendor but without any involvement from there IT Department, their developers, etc. so it can literally happen in minutes now instead of weeks or months, whatever it used to take;And then the second piece is were allowing them to create this data profile that is truly you know encompasses the entire journey of the visitor. And when you combine those things together what you do is you create a network effect for the enterprise themselves that says, Well, if I work with 30 vendors now using a platform like Ensighten actually makes all 30 of those vendors more powerful because theyre able to access a unified profile so theyre all able to make a slightly smarter decision on each interaction. And we do other things; we make them faster, make them easier to manage and theres less overhead and sort of having a n umber of vendors that exist on the site.So if you are an enterprise you have to have a very strong incentive, start working with vendor number 31 because the original thirty get better when you bring the number 31 or 32, or so on. And so that really just sort of stems from that consulting work that were doing at those digital analytics agency for the seven years prior. When I saw that I was shocked that no one else was doing, it was sort of like it came to me and started doing a bunch of research and they were there are people kind of poking around the edges of it but there was no one was really taking that vision to the market the way that I wanted to. And so I spun out of that company and you know the rest is history.Martin: Josh, how does it work? Imagine, I install this kind of simplified the tag manager in my company. So I have 30 vendors who Im plugging into. How do you join the data then from those vendors?Josh: So it starts with the implementation of the tag management syste m itself. On the back of the card is the implementation guide itself, so single line of code and one of the core requirements that we had from the onset was the implementation of our platform has to eliminate the complexity that is traditionally existed where it would be, “I want to implement a web analytics tool” and it would take months of complexity to configure it customize it, capture all the events and custom variables that you want to capture. And so that single line of code never changes for the client, once they put it there theyre able to take any net new vendor and essentially just take them out of our library, we have over a thousand vendors in our in our app library, and literally just drag them onto the site put in their user ID and password and configure them.Now, for vendors that are already on their site, this is actually the hardest part of the I usually describe it this way; you’re implemented the moment you put the line of code on the site and most of our c ustomers start doing net new things immediately. United Airlines was an example of this, they first started working with us right after they merge with Continental, they had a list of 12 things that they wanted to deploy on the new combined website. Ensighten came up as a part of that new platform of the combined company and they realized that once they put the line of code on the site, those twelve new vendors they were done it in less than a month and they plan the entire year to do it. And that was a great example of sort of the agility that they can sort of generate from being able to just do any forward-looking things immediately.Now the harder part of this is generally when you have an existing site and want to take, let’s say, youre taking 10 vendors off that site and you want to redeploy them, the redeployment is actually very easy. The hardest part of this process, not surprisingly given sort of the legacy and sort of the challenge of trying to get away from, is you need to have your IT department to go in and actually remove them. And so taking the code off the pages and many of our customers actually will delay that because it’s a traditional IT project and so they say, “Well you know it next time we refresh the site I’ll get it off but just start managing that thing. And so we can manage the code is already there, it wont be quite as performance optimized as it would be if it was flowing into our system but it allows the customer to get immediate value out of it.Martin: Josh, you actually said that you change the paradigm from having a third-party data to really owning the data as a customer. Imagine, Ive implemented the tag manager I have something like Google analytics on there, are you able to push me in real time raw data of what the customers doing on my website?Josh: Absolutely and thanks for reminding because I didn’t answer your full question before, which was: if you think about how we are changing the data paradigm, now when a c ustomer who wants to own that data asset what theyre effectively doing is theyre creating their own copy specific to that individual on that if you stick with United Airlines example, Microsoft or Sony or American Express or anywhere customers, what you end up with is they will take and start creating their own first-party, key to a first-party cookie that is only accessible to them and they will start collecting the superset of all the data that goes. So in your example the data that goes to Google Analytics they’ll also choose to collect that. If theyre using voice of customer solution like opinion lab they’ll also collect that data, if theyre using a personalization engine they’ll collect whether or not test A versus test B was working for this particular visitor or what segment they are in, etc.Absolutely we can provide that data in real-time to them and a number of our customers like actually there was just an article and ad exchanger about Coke and how they use our plat form to do exactly that use case whether collecting all of that data. And their model has been to not work with a traditional web analytics tool but to feed all of that data as a real-time stream into their enterprise data warehouse where they apply all the sophisticated BI tools that they have against that data for the modeling and data science teams that they have there.But the important element here is thatâ€" and sometimes I show this was the first time your prospect of actually kind of short chart that shows like imagine the customer views an ad. In that world the ad server once you double click will have a data point about that customers. You viewed it out maybe you clicked on maybe you didn’t. In our world, Ensighten would also have a copy of that or the customer take a Coke would have that same piece of data. Now something happens on the website, now double-click wont have any view of that, this would be let’s say web trans, whatever the web analytics tool was. Well web trans will have one data piece, while Ensighten will have another data piece, so now we have two data pieces, and you have two systems with one data pieces and you can sort of extend that down through, “Ok now Im interactive the mobile app, I’m on a social media platform Im doing all of these things.” And it starts to become very clear that Ensighten has the master dataset where all of these other data sets are just as little fragments of, “ok, this is one channels interaction, this is one media type or this is only things on my own properties or these are only things on purchased or paid media”.Martin: Do you also provide analytic tools based on your Ensighten stuff or is it only that you are collecting other data and then pumping the data to your customer?Josh: So, we actually do both. So, philosophically we are very committed to the idea that our platform and the data needs to be open so our customers can connect any third-party vendor they want to that and they can ex tract that at any level of granularity whether it was like the Coke example of a real-time stream of that data coming out or they want to batch exports, whatever might be. So thats philosophically very important but we very quickly kind of learned that our customers, of course now have this really rich dataset, they want to have Ensighten and they want to be able to immediately explore without taking it out of the platform and sort of taking on additional work.So we actually did an acquisition in 2014 where we acquired a omnichannel data analytics platform and mainly because of this specific use case. We had this tremendously differentiated dataset and we wanted to rapidly accelerate our customers’ ability to explore and model that data and do omnichannel data analysis and segmentation of their customers. So we have a solution on that side as well.Martin: Josh, you’re actually supporting thousands of vendors for the platform. When you started out, you didnt support that many, bu t what the first three or six months look like? How did you start billing the product and finding customers?Josh: Vendor support first. We actually started with four key requirements with the system.One was this one line of code that I referenced earlier.Second was that we had to support every vendor completely natively whether they existed today or they would exist in the future with no modification.Number three was we had to work in every digital touch-point, so it wasnt just the web tool, it we had to work in mobile and had to work alternative things, had to work with any of these emerging devices; ATM machines, whatever it could be.And the number four was it had to make all of those experiences faster. It had to be a better customer experience, if you uploaded that code here it would load faster, drive a better customer experience.So the way we got that was we were not forcing any vendor to modify themselves at all, we were able to just sort of natively support and takeâ€" even though we didnt have fancy apps like we do now at our app marketplace, partnerships with all of these guys. We were able to literally create an environment where someone could cut and paste the solutions and say, “I want to run this version of this vendor”, cut and paste, boom, it’s done and so very easy.Now the question about how did we get started, I think we had a little bit of an advantage because coming from that digital analytics agency I knew a lot of enterprise customers and I had at least enough credibility with those customers and sort of a reputation in the space when I would call someone up at one of these big enterprises they wouldn’t just slap the phone down. Because I used to have these conversations that would go something like this and say “If I could replace all the tags on your site with a single line of code, it would make your site faster you would never have to talk to your IT department again would you be interested?” And they would be like, “Of course but you dont have something that does that.” And I’d be like, “But no I do”. And they’re like “Well you never lied to me before. So Come on in and I’ll at least look at demo.”And that was literally how we got our first handfull of customers which were people like Nestle Purina, Paramount investments, Sony Electronics, etc. So we were fortunate and being able to acquire those first handful customers in our first few months of operation. And we took a slightly different sort of path than a lot of others Silicon Valley startups. That wasnt go, come up with the idea, go up and down in Sand Hill road, raise a bunch of money and then spend a year building product and then go to market. We did it completely backwards.So we went to recognize the need and the problem and started bootstrapping the company based on the success of the prior company which was a luxury and then as soon as we had an initial version of the product we were also fortunate that we were able to p retty easily attract people and say, Would you help us beta test this and validate whether it works? Does it really solve the problem we say it does and what else would you like to see in it? And so when the company started which was officially incorporated on the last day of 2009, by February of 2010 we were literally closing our first paying customers which were generally people coming out of that beta program that we were working with.Martin: As you have a lot of B2B customers and especially bigger ones and, from my understanding is they having much longer sales cycles, how did you solve this kind of problem? Because when you are starting out you are kind of cash constraintJosh: That was a challenging thing for us for sure because we had this initial excitement when we launched the product when we closed our first half dozen customers in the first few months. And myself and other early folks here thought okay well that was just going to take off if we justâ€" were going to really make this huge. And then all of a sudden it was like it just we didnt sell again for like two quarters. We had lots of demos and lots of prospects we just did not get people weren’t signing contracts.Part of it is exactly the enterprise sales cycles are long one. Part of it was just the adoption cycle of a new technology we were in a category that really didnt exist before, people didnt have budget set aside for tag management or this sort of digital marketing platform optimization in this way, and so they would see the demo and say “Wow, that’s awesome. I want it. But I don’t have any money, I dont know how I would get this maybe Ill ask for it next year.” That kind of discussion would go on.So it was really about six months we were just struggling, just closing 1-2 customers through that period of time and then all of a sudden the market started to mature to the point where those early customers that we had were starting to have great success and have phenomenal ROI st ories that made it easier to sell the other ones. It just started to become a little bit more mainstream people say “Okay, I know somebody whos done that whos had experience with it.” We started to get some of our early customers onto the speaking circuit within sort of the industry trade shows and so on, so they were publicizing and helping us publicize. There was just sort of that intangible timing element which is so tricky when you’re doing a startup because you’re going to have the best idea and if you’re timing is just off you can blow through your cash just be done. But yes, that was definitely a challenge for us because we werent sure when the market would truly sort of mature and be ready for it.Martin: Josh, I totally understand the advantage of using tag management like Ensighten, only single line of codes and you join lots of data sources, totally get it. But what are the downsides of using something like this? I don’t know, maybe page load speed, performance ?Josh: Well, the page load speed actually accelerates. It accelerates for a few reasons:One we can deploy specialized infrastructure to serve these little chunks of code which if you think about what most websites serve their content through itll be through CDN like an Akamai which is optimized for big files; images, videos, etc. And so the underlying files of these tags and these vendors tend to be these really small 2, 3, 4 kilobytes of little JavaScript files. And so what you would do to optimize your infrastructure to serve those is quite different than what you would do to optimize for big video and image files, so that’s one.The second is that we can control how they load so we can as opposed to loading the mall synchronously and say you wait until theyre all, which is how some poorly implemented sites would affect were able to dynamically insert them just the right place in the sites so that the site becomes interactive and that it becomes functional much sooner that would have otherwise.And then the third piece is if you think about a high complexity site, a site somebody whos got fifty tags or more most of those tags literally dont apply to every visitor, they apply to some of the visitors. So if youre coming from this campaign but run this code but I might have done twenty times in there. So any one visitor will only have one of those twenty tags actually be applicable to them. In the old world, all 20 would run, all twenty would collect that visitor’s data which is a privacy issue even though its irrelevant to them. In our world, Ensighten would actually dynamically decide, Hey, this visitor has only this piece is relevant to them and so in that case youd actually save 95% to load because we would only bring down the tag that needs to run for that one individual and so the other nineteen tags literally dont even need to download or execute for that visitor. For the next one it might be a different one but its able to essentially personalize whic h tags go until you can take a huge amount of the payload that needs to both be downloaded and the burden you put on the browser in terms of processing that code and actually executing it.So the downside case is honestly I would say its there really isnt a strong one in the sense of like The value proposition is sort of so self-evident, its very similar to content management in the sense that you would generally not want to start running a website without a platform like this, it just doesnt make sense to do this stuff by hand. If you were going to dig deep for downside case youd say well IT’s giving up control just like they would do the content management system someone could post a piece of inappropriate content or in this case they could literally do something without the appropriate sort of guard rails in place and we invest heavily to create those guard rails for people but no matter what you do somebody could potentially hurt themselves with it or break a site or launch som ething that interferes with some of other piece of functionality on site if there isnt the appropriate workflow and sort of testing in place. And thats the biggest objection that we typically hear is that IT and security, in particular financial services, they really want to make sure that theres a really enterprise-class solution in place that has security workflows, permissioning, that the data is secure because what were really talking about is a sensitive asset for global enterprise or any of our European customers in particular that can be very sensitive topic.Martin: How do you go about this safe harbor topic because, for example, for European customers?Josh: You mean in terms of storage of their data? So for European customers who want to take advantage of that universal profile, then that data will literally be stored in European data centers and not allowed to transport back to North America which is little bit more challenging from an infrastructure standpoint but again I think one of the reasons that you want to go with a real enterprise-class vendor in the space as opposed to some of the smaller guys that are out there.Martin: Josh, how’s the revenue model working and how did you decide about the pricing?Josh: The revenue model is pretty traditional SaaS based software, so it is generally an annual subscription to our service. And thats like any of the SaaS based technologies out there so you just sign up for a year, two or three years depending on how long you want commit and how big discount you want to get. Generally that is also based on the volume of transactions that you have; going on so how frequently are you interacting with our platform. If youre used to buy web analytics tool it’ll generally be the same kind of model, I used to buy a billion pages from my site then I would buy a billion server calls from Ensighten to help support that because generally each interaction would going to be responding with heres a customized for this vis itor in these tags that apply to them.Let’s see, the pricing and how we started with it. I think anytime youre starting out its very hard to figure out what is the value to your customer and you generally have very little idea what your own costs are you going to deliver because you are very early stages, you are not at scale. You are losing money no matter what you charge. Its tricky. We actually started with the domain based pricing models so trying to say that people could put it all over their domain and it wasnt server call based, that turned out to be a little bit cumbersome for some of our big clients. So as we started to work with really big organizations like Microsoft they would say well thats great but it kind ofâ€" heres an example with our store where we have a hundred domains across hundred different countries and that kind of works for you but then if we go and put you on microsoft.com and thats one domain and its billions and billions of requests that kind of works for us. Now, when I want to get kind of balances out in a customer like that so its not that big of a deal but they were actually the one that helped drive us to the decision to move to server call base pricing because they were much more able to allocate costs across different business units and so they would buy large quantity and then allocate across many different business units. So they found that model made it a lot easier than domain based that might have a small group consuming a very little amount of traffic but for a lot of domains that was not necessarily good.Martin: And for the pricing, did you rather use the cost based pricing, value based pricing or just by looking at competitive pricing?Josh: So when we started there really wasnt a competitive example. There was actually a company in Europe called TagMan who we bought last year in 2014, but we werent seeing them in a lot of the North American deals when we were just starting. So our primary goal was to try to find a value based price that worked which was associated with the value of the customers paid and where I think we ultimately ended up was that you tended to be a combination of value-based pricing but also so correlating based on what other guys in the marketing tag stack were charging and what people were used to. So if they were used to pay $100,000 a year for solution then they might be equally happy to pay $100,000 for ours but they would have paid $200,000. So it was that sort of tweaking the model that took place in the first couple years.Martin: And Josh, you said that especially in the beginning you dont have a good idea of how the cost functions working, how the revenue functions working. How often did you need to adjust the pricing model?Josh: We tried not to adjust it that often because it was tricky in that first say five customers. It got adjusted a lot because we were youre not really even sure if youre in the right ballpark and youre trying to calibrate your customers are telling you whats appropriate what they feel good about and you want to be in that zone where they feel really good theyre getting a really strong ROI but its also you know when you start dropping that in your models you say, “Okay, I can see how that will work for me It’s not like I’m going to charge you $10 a month.”ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEUR FROM JOSH MANIONMartin: Josh, let’s talk about your advice for first time entrepreneurs. What type of learnings have you learned over the last 5 years?Josh: I think there are a few things. One thing is thats always been true in my own mind here and starting companies is the faster you can get a product in front of the customer and you can actually get live feedback and the closer you can get, even if its not a paid sale but the idea of getting you know live product working in a customer environment and seeing that, that to me is the fastest path to creating value. I see a lot of entrepreneurs that I talked with and had coffee with that feel like they cant do that and Im always finding myself encouraging them do anything it doesnt need to be pretty, you dont need to have a UI, you just need to demonstrate that what youre talking about, number one works and number two creates value for the customer. If you do those two things and if you even in the third element of they’re actually paying you anything for it, now weve got something to work with in terms of creating a business or if youre interested in raising outside funds. Those are things that the vast majority of companies that investors see dont have, at least early stage investors, and so youre taking these massive elements of risk and just eliminating it. We talked a little bit about one of the things that I would also add in that category which is timing. You have to be very conscious of the timing and not only have that patience when you have a market that you may be a little bit ahead of but making sure that you create the strategy for the company, and i n particular the financing strategy for the company, thats associated with that. I think, for example, if we dont raise, we ended up bootstrapping for almost three years before we ended up raising our first sort of professional investment and I honestly believe if we had raised money earlier especially during that period I was describing we werent selling to so many customers, we would have probably burned through a ton of money and I dont think any amount of money was going to change the fact that the market wasnt ready to buy and so we could have gotten ourselves into a very bad situation where wed set expectations with investors, we’d be disappointed, weve already raised money, taking delusion and now we were much more nimble and being able to navigate the situation at the bootstrap company that was just like, “Ok well we wont hire anybody, were not selling to customers” and thats very easy to make there but if you raised your series A, there goes your expectations, “Are you hiring these people, are you scaling?” And it allows it to progress a bit more natural on its own.Martin: Josh, thank you so much for your time.Josh: I appreciate the time.Martin: And next time you are thinking about what other customers actually are doing on my website and really in a combined dataset maybe you can think of Ensighten. Thanks.

The Thing Around Your Neck - 943 Words

The collection of short stories ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie demonstrates that in Nigeria, men women, boys and girls are treated differently, and these relationship in which gender inequality exists leads to family conflict. And corruption exists in Nigeria and also the violence. These issues have lasting impacts on the characters. Many of the characters experience violence, some due to civil war and conflict between religious groups, and others due to corruption. In the story ‘Cell One’ Nnamabia both witnesses and experiences violence in the Nigerian jail. When Nnamabia has been caught and put in jail, his family bribed police and guard to see Nnamabia. Also Nnamabia paid police to treat him better.†¦show more content†¦The author uses sensory details of sounds, smells and feelings to highlight to horror of the violence experienced by Chika. ‘†¦smell is sickening, of roasted fish, unlike that of any she has ever smelled’. And also author uses future tense and repetition ‘never find her sister’ to highlight the tragedy and horrific event of the war and violence. Throughout the story, the author demonstrates the futility of war and violence identifies that there is no positive affects to anyone at all. The novel also explores the negative impact that inequality has on the lives of Nigerians. Characters experience both gender inequality and inequality between different classes of society. In the story ‘Tomorrow Is Too Far’ the author highlights that how her grandmamma treats her and brother differently. Her grandmamma taught her brother Nonso how to pluck the coconuts but not her. Because ‘girls never plucked coconuts’. Nonso was always given the first sip of coconuts and grandmamma cooked meals with him in mind, not his sister. Nonso’s sister was told instead ‘this is how you will take care of your husband one day’. And also her mother used to end her brother’s nightly goodnight ‘ho-ho-ho’ laughing, but never left her room laughing. That’s all because Nonso is grandmama’s ‘sons only son, who would carry on the Nnabuisi’ name. This demonstrates that the importance of name and that these beli efs lead to gender inequality. The author also shows the negative impact of gender inequality.Show MoreRelatedThe Thing Around Your Neck854 Words   |  4 PagesThe women show courage and intelligence even though they are culturally suppressed. Discuss. The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie highlights the often challenging lives of Nigerian women living in Africa, but also abroad in the United States. It is however, not the difficulties which Adichie is ultimately focusing on, but the courage and intelligence of women who are able to make ‘small victories’, overcoming various attempts of cultural oppression. Adichie’s characters areRead MoreThe Thing Around Your Neck2524 Words   |  11 PagesYWCA Indianapolis P.O. Box 40264 Indianapolis, IN 46240 T: 317-250-8593 EM: ywcaindy@sbcglobal.net www.ywcaindy.org Questions for â€Å"The Thing Around Your Neck† by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Cell One 1. What were your thoughts on this first story about the spoiled boy, Nnamabia who stole from neighbors and his own family and always got himself out of whatever jam he was in? 2. Why do you think his family let him get away with such actions for so long? Could you tell they treated boys differentlyRead MoreThe Thing Around Your Neck Essay960 Words   |  4 PagesChimamanda Ngozi Adichie The Thing around your Neck Essay: Analysis and acknowledgement The main theme in the text †The Thing around your Neck† must be that outstanding culture clash a lot of hope full immigrants in America are exposed to. Just from the very beginning we experience that the main character Akunna from Nigeria has very high thoughts of going to America. Her family is also very convinced that it is going to be a huge thing for her, they are expecting her to send them presentsRead MoreThe Thing Around Your Neck Critical Analysis984 Words   |  4 Pagesunderstood as ‘boys being boys’. Adichie uses this common cliche of the treatment of men to her advantage in The Thing Around Your Neck, a book primarily about the struggles of Nigerian immigrant women. In The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, men are generalized to be antagonistic and inconsiderate, to further emphasizes the struggles of African women. The Thing Around Your Neck is a collection of different short stories ranging in characters, situations, and overall themes. In theRead MoreThe Thing Around Your Neck Critical Analysis881 Words   |  4 PagesAdichie made sure to show a large difference in the way men and women treat each other. In the book â€Å"The Thing Around Your Neck†, Adichie chooses to represent men in a disturbing, disrespectful and uncomfortable way and women is a more vulnerable way. She does this to show that there are a lot of men that try to take advantage of women in many different ways. In the book â€Å"The Thing Around Your Neck†, Adichie chooses to represent men in a disturbing, disrespectful and uncomfortable way by adding inRead MoreThe Thing Around Your Neck Short Story Summary1111 Words   |  5 PagesIn the short stories â€Å"The Thing Around Your Neck, written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Drown, written by Junot Diaz, there are two different characters who are both immigrants, and their lives after coming to America. In Drown, Yunior is a boy in his last year of high school, who sells drugs to younger kids, as a living. His former best friend,Beto left for college, and the story starts with his life without Beto. In TTAYN, the main character,and how he has developed without him. Akunna immigratesRead MoreThe Thing Around Your Neck By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie2141 Words   |  9 PagesThe short story collection, The Thing around Your Neck, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, contains twelve short stories about Nigerian characters in either Africa or America. In the collection, it is integrating to see the struggles of the Nigerian characters that straddle two worlds. It is also easy to see individuals act to control their own life, whether it is a woman or a man in the story. The protagonist of each story has the choice to choose whether they will accept, decline, or change the situationRead MoreAnalysis Of Chimamanda Adichie s The Thing Around Your Neck Essay1643 Words   |  7 PagesChimamanda Adichie’s collection of short stories The Thing Around Your Neck deviates from what many individuals in the West may consider to be the traditional view of Africa. In her 2012 TED Talk, The Danger of a Single Story, Adichie states that the â€Å"telling of African stories in the West† is a â€Å"tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness†¦Ã¢â‚¬ . In this same TED Talk, Adichie also speaks about how at one point a professor told her that the novel was not â€Å"authentica llyRead MoreThe Thing Around Your Neck - Tomorrow Is Too Far Analysis Essay1742 Words   |  7 Pageswhereas Dozie was only the son of a daughter. It was this summer that you found the shedded skin of the snake your Grandmama called echi eteka, ‘Tomorrow Is Too Far’ because it would kill you in ten minutes. The main character made it very clear that it was not this summer that you fell in love with your cousin, Dozie. That had happened three years earlier. The most significant thing about this summer was the death of Nonso. No one in Nigeria actually called it summer. It was the time betweenRead MoreInterpreter Of Maladies By Jhumpa Lahiri And The Thing Around Your Neck By Chimamanda Adichie1395 Words   |  6 PagesJhumpa Lahiri and The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Adichie. Both of the authors’ stories examine the cultural experience immigrants endure, marriage often playing a large role. A Temporary Matter from the collection, Interpreter of Maladies uses a well-established immigrant couple, whereas Arrangers of Marriage from The Thing Around Your Neck uses an arranged marriage to show the experiences immigrants endure. While we often recognize marriage as a beautiful thing, we must understand it

The 1950s and the 1960s - 900 Words

The 1950s and the 1960s had many similarities, though they had many differences as well. Their similarities and differences include: the politics, the economy, the society, and the culture of both decades. In the 1950s, North Korea moved into South Korea and began a civil war between the two parallel countries. The reason for this dispute was the border lines as well as guerrilla fighting in the South, which created a greater tension on the issue. The reason why the U.S entered the Korean War was so that the Soviet Union would not gain another nation and, in turn, more power. Like the 50s, our country was also at war with another country in the 60s. This time, the U.S was at war with Vietnam. The U.S entered the war because the†¦show more content†¦After Kennedy’s assassination, the country mourned and Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the presidency and began to finish the work that JFK started. Although Eisenhower was not a take charge kind of president, the country achieved a heightened level of prosperity. Economically, the 1950s were a pretty successful era. People had been saving their money through WW2 and they were ready to start buying houses, cars, etc. There was much inflation in the during the war, but it had quickly diminished as the years progressed. One of the issues that Eisenhower tried to address was to balance the federal budget of the nation. This was very difficult, especially since the families of the 50s were buying more and spending less with the use of credit cards. However, in the 1960s, prosperity was becoming too far out of reach. The Cold War and the Korean War were very costly in military spending. It had taken its toll on the economy. Even with more people buying, the economy was growing at a very slow rate. There were also millions of Americans who were still living in poverty, and the economy had gone into recession quite a few times in the 60s. Then, the stock market fell dramatically, the worst it had been since the Depression. Kennedy addressed this by making tax cuts for larger business, which helped the economy develop and grow more prosperous in the years to come. However, inflation made a reappearanceShow MoreRelated 1950-1960 Essay1699 Words   |  7 Pages1950-1960 During the 1950s, the United States experienced great change with the end of World War II, making it difficult to label the busy decade. America was the most powerful nation in the world and it was a time of complacency. The United States accepted two new states, Hawaii and Alaska (www.fifties.com). The science world boomed with new inventions; televisions broadcast nationally; rock n roll was popular; commercial hotel and fast food chains became common; the car industry exploded;Read MoreThe Civil Rights Movement Of The 1950s And 1960s1183 Words   |  5 PagesThis essay will discuss the impact of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s on the lives of African-Americans in that period. The Civil Rights movement refers to the movement which aimed to remove racial discrimination and segregation and improve the social, political, legal, and economic rights of black people in America . Although slavery had been abolished with the end of the Civil War , the â€Å"Jim Crow† laws kept black people and white people segregated from each other and the votingRead More1950s and 1960s: A Decade of Fashion and Fabrics2054 Words   |  8 Pagesï » ¿Introduction The era of 1960s was the era of extensive change throughout the world of fashion and also the one that generated ideas and images which are still present as modern as todays contemporary fashion. Fashion previously had aimed to a specific market of wealthy and mature elite but now-a-days, the tastes and preferences of young people are at the focus. The decade started with the dominance from the Parisian designers who dealt with very expensive haute couture garments. The women apparelRead More The Influence of American Culture in the 1950s and 1960s in Canada538 Words   |  3 Pagesborder (the United States) have been captivating the Canadian audiences by large. American media has had a momentous revolutionizing effect on Canada, even through efforts made to define Canada with its own cultural identity. Pop culture in the 1950s and 1960s began to spread and infest the nation from front to back through radio shows, books and magazines, television programs, and even motion pictures. Whether it is culture in terms of political affairs, clothing or the latest musical sensations, theRead MoreThe Black Freedom Movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s2001 Words   |  9 PagesFor my essay, I have chosen to discuss the statement â€Å"The Black Freedom Movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s captured the attention of millions†¦ As American Americans started streaming into American cities, or what American corporations call â€Å"†major markets† U.S. businesses sought to influence the consumption patterns of these increasingly important black consumers.† I have chosen to discuss this title because I believe it had an extremely rich and interesting background to it as well as being ableRead MoreThe Independent Record Labels of the 1950’s and 1960’s4437 Words   |  18 PagesThe Independent Record Labels of the 1950’s and 1960’s History of Music Production Eric Eller Throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, a wave of new musical movements by independent record labels and new artists emerged in the United States. This movement is captured in the stories of those label creators and owners, and in the turbulent journey through their successes and failures. The first emergence was fueled by multiple factors: competitive economic circumstances, up-and-coming local musicalRead MoreThe 1950s and 1960s: A Time of Great Changes Shaping the America We Have Today1006 Words   |  5 PagesWhen most people think of the 1950’s or 1960’s, they think of Elvis, Greasers, jukeboxes, Woodstock, and rainbow peace signs and hippie love. Although these symbols are somewhat accurate (and very popular), not many people think about the changes society and culture went through. The 1950’s and 60’s were a time of great change and freedom for many Americans. Everything from World War II, to the gay liberation movement, to the Civil R ights Act of 1964 helped to change society. Many of the viewsRead MoreThe 1950’s -1960’s was a tough time for African Americans. Struggling for freedom since the 19th700 Words   |  3 Pages The 1950’s -1960’s was a tough time for African Americans. Struggling for freedom since the 19th century, they were finally closer to getting what they deserved. Alice walker’s short story, â€Å"Everyday use,† describes the different stances blacks had during that decade. The author uses characterization, symbolism, and theme to demonstrate African American viewpoints during the civil rights movement. Characters are picked carefully because without them the plot of the story isRead MorePlease Discuss the Social, Political, and Economic Conditions of the 1950’s; Which Lead to the Social Upheaval of the 1960’s.3629 Words   |  15 PagesMicah Briggs HSTV 440 Essay 1 Please discuss the social, political, and economic conditions of the 1950’s; which lead to the social upheaval of the 1960’s. In the 1950s the United States was marked by economic growth and an increase in manufacturing and home construction due to the post WWII economic boom. The Cold War also began during this time frame and brought with it many conflicts that helped create the proliferation of a politically conservative environment throughout the countryRead MoreTo What Extent Was Grass Roots Activism a Significant Reason to Why the Civil Rights Movement Grew in the 1950s and 1960s1394 Words   |  6 PagesTo what extent was grass roots activism a significant reason to why the Civil Rights Movement Grew in the 1950s and 1960s The civil rights movement grew for a number of reasons during the 1950’s and 1960s. Prior to this select time period America were fighting in the Cold War and many black soldiers battled in the name of ‘freedom’. This was ironic as these black soldiers were fighting for something that they didn’t even have back home. Often Black soldiers talked about the ‘Double V Campaign’;

The Return Midnight Chapter 10 Free Essays

Damon was making his way up the beautiful rose-covered trel is below the window of the bedchamber of M. le Princess Jessalyn D’Aubigne, a very wealthy, beautiful, and much-admired girl who had the bluest blood of any vampire in the Dark Dimension, according to the books he’d bought. In fact, he’d listened to the locals and it was rumored that Sage himself had changed her two years ago, and had given her this bijoux castle to live in. We will write a custom essay sample on The Return: Midnight Chapter 10 or any similar topic only for you Order Now Delicate gem that it appeared, though, the little castle had already presented Damon with several problems. There had been that razor-wire fence, on which he ripped his leather jacket; an unusual y dexterous and stubborn guard whom it had real y been a pity to strangle; an inner moat that had almost taken him unawares; and a few dogs that he had treated with the Saber-tranquilizer routine – using Mrs. Flowers’s sleeping powder, which he’d brought with him from Earth. It would have been easier to poison them, but Jessalyn was reputed to have a very soft heart for animals and he needed her for at least three days. That should be long enough to make him a vampire – if they did nothing else during those days. Now, as he pul ed himself silently up the trel is, he mental y added long rose thorns to the list of inconveniences. He also rehearsed his first speech to Jessalyn. She had been – was – would forever be – eighteen. But it was a young eighteen, since she had only two years’experience at being a vampire. He comforted himself with this as he climbed silently into a window. Still silently, moving slowly in case the princess had guardian animals in her bedchamber, Damon parted layer after layer of filmy, translucent black curtains that kept the blood-red light of the sun from shining into the chamber. His boots sank into the thick pile of a black rug. Making it out of the enfolding curtains, Damon saw that the entire chamber was decorated in a simple theme by a master of contrast. Jet-black and off-black. black. He liked it a lot. There was an enormous bed with more bil owing filmy black curtains almost encasing it. The only way to approach it was from the foot, where the diaphanous curtains were thinner. Standing there in the cathedral-like silence of the great chamber, Damon looked at the slight figure under the black silk sheets, among dozens of smal throw pil ows. She was a jewel like the castle. Delicate bones. A look of utter innocence as she slept. An ethereal river of fine, scarlet hair spil ing about her. He could see individual hairs straying on the black sheets. She looked a little like Bonnie. Damon was pleased. He pul ed out the same knife he had put to Elena’s throat, and just for a moment hesitated – but no, this was no time to be thinking of Elena’s golden warmth. Everything depended on this fragile-shouldered child in front of him. He put the point of the knife to his chest, deliberately placing it wide of his heart in case some blood had to be spil ed†¦and coughed. Nothing happened. The princess, who was wearing a black negligee that showed frail-looking arms as fine and pale as porcelain, went on sleeping. Damon noticed that the nails on her smal fingers were lacquered the exact scarlet of her hair. The two large pil ar candles set in tal black stands were giving off an enticing perfume, as wel as being clocks – the farther down they burned, the easier to tel time. The lighting was perfect – everything was perfect – except that Jessalyn was stil asleep. Damon coughed again, loudly – and bumped the bed. The princess woke, starting up and simultaneously bringing two sheathed blades out of her hair. â€Å"Who is it? Is someone there?†She was looking in every direction but the right one. â€Å"It’s only me, your highness.†Damon pitched his voice low, but fraught with unrequited need. â€Å"You don’t have to be afraid,†he added, now that she’d at last gotten the right direction and seen him. He knelt by the foot of her bed. He’d miscalculated a bit. The bed was so large and high that his chest and the knife were far below Jessalyn’s line of sight. â€Å"Here I wil take my life,†he announced, very loudly to make sure that Jessalyn was keeping up with the program. After a moment or two the princess’s head popped up over the foot of the bed. She balanced herself with hands spread wide and narrow shoulders hunched close to her. At this distance he could see that her eyes were green – a complicated green consisting of many different rings and speckles. At first she just hissed at him and lifted her knives held in hands whose fingers were tipped with nails of scarlet. Damon bore with her. She would learn in time that al this wasn’t real y necessary; that in fact it had gone out of fashion in the real world decades ago and was only kept alive by pulp fiction and old movies. â€Å"Here at your feet I slay myself,†he said again, to make sure she didn’t miss a syl able, or the entire point, for that matter. â€Å"You – yourself?†She was suspicious. â€Å"Who are you? How did you get here? Why would you do such a thing?† â€Å"I got here through the road of my madness. I did it out of what I know is madness I can no longer live with.† â€Å"What madness? And are you going to do it now?†the princess asked with interest. â€Å"Because if you’re not, I’l have to cal my guards and – wait a minute,†she interrupted herself. She grabbed his knife before he could stop her and licked it. â€Å"This is a metal blade,†she told him, tossing it back. â€Å"I know.†Damon let his head fal so that hair curtained his eyes and said painful y: â€Å"I am†¦a human, your highness.† He was covertly watching through his lashes and he saw that Jessalyn brightened up. â€Å"I thought you were just some weak, useless vampire,†she said absently. â€Å"But now that I look at you†¦Ã¢â‚¬ A rose petal of a pink tongue came out and licked her lips. â€Å"There’s no point in wasting the good stuff, is there?† She was like Bonnie. She said exactly what she thought, when she thought it. Something inside Damon wanted to laugh. He stood again, looking at the girl on the bed with al the fire and passion of which he was capable – and felt that it wasn’t enough. Thinking about the real Bonnie, alone and unhappy, was†¦wel , passion-quenching. But what else could he do? Suddenly he knew what he could do. Before, when he’d stopped himself from thinking of Elena, he had cut off any genuine passion or desire. But he was doing this for Elena, as much as for himself. Elena couldn’t be his Princess of Darkness if he couldn’t be her Prince. This time, when he looked down at M. le Princess, it was differently. He could feel the atmosphere change. â€Å"Highness, I have no right even to speak to you,†he said, deliberately putting one booted foot on the metal scrol work that formed the frame of the bed. â€Å"You know as wel as I that you can kil me with a single blow†¦say, here† – pointing to a spot on his jaw – â€Å"but you have already slain me – â€Å" Jessalyn looked confused, but waited. † – with love. I fel in love with you the moment I saw you. You could break my neck, or – as I would say if I were permitted to touch your perfumed white hand – you could curl those fingers around my throat and strangle me. I beg you to do it.† Jessalyn was beginning to look puzzled but excited. Blushing, she held out one smal hand to Damon, but clearly without any intention of strangling him. â€Å"Please, you must,†Damon said earnestly, never taking his eyes off hers. â€Å"That is the only thing I ask of you: that you kil me yourself instead of cal ing your guards so that the last sight I see wil be your beautiful face.† â€Å"You’re il ,†Jessalyn decided, stil looking flustered. â€Å"There have been other unbalanced minds who have made their way past the first wal of my castle – although never to my chambers. I’l give you to the doctors so that they can make you wel .† â€Å"Please,†said Damon, who had forged his way through the last of the filmy black hangings and was now looming over the sitting princess. â€Å"Grant me instant death, rather than leaving me to die a little each day. You don’t know what I’ve done. I can’t stop dreaming of you. I’ve fol owed you from shop to shop when you went out. I am already dying now as you ravish me with your nobility and radiance, knowing that I am no more than the paving stones you walk on. No doctor can change that.† Jessalyn was clearly considering. Obviously, no one had ever talked to her like this. Her green eyes fixed on his lips, the lower of which was stil bleeding. Damon gave an indifferent little laugh and said, â€Å"One of your guards caught me and very properly tried to kil me before I could reach you and disturb your sleep. I’m afraid I had to kil him to get here,†he said, standing between one pil ar candle and the girl on the bed so that his shadow was thrown over her. Jessalyn’s eyes widened in approval even as the rest of her seemed more fragile than ever. â€Å"It’s stil bleeding,†she whispered. â€Å"I could – â€Å" â€Å"You can do anything you want,†Damon encouraged her with a wry quirk of a smile on his lips. It was true. She could. â€Å"Then come here.†She thumped a place by the nearest pil ow on the bed. â€Å"What are you cal ed?† â€Å"Damon,†he said as he stripped off his jacket and lay down, chin propped on one elbow, with the air of one not unused to such things. â€Å"Just that? Damon?† â€Å"You can cut it stil shorter. I am nothing but Shame now,†he replied, taking another minute to think of Elena and to hold Jessalyn’s eyes hypnotical y. â€Å"I was a vampire – a powerful and proud one – on Earth – but I was tricked by a kitsune†¦Ã¢â‚¬ He told her a garbled version of Stefan’s story, omitting Elena or any nonsense about wanting to be human. He said that when he managed to escape the prison that had taken his vampire self, he decided to end his own human life. But at that moment, he had seen Princess Jessalyn and thought that, serving her, he would be happy with his sorry lot. Alas, he said, it only fed his disgraceful feelings for her highness. â€Å"Now my madness has driven me to actual y accost you in your own chambers. Make an example of me, your highness, that wil cause other evildoers to tremble. Burn me, have me flogged and quartered, put my head on a pike to cause those who might do you il to cast themselves into a fire first.†He was now in bed with her, leaning back a little to expose his bare throat. â€Å"Don’t be sil y,†Jessalyn said, with a little catch in her voice. â€Å"Even the meanest of my servants wants to live.† â€Å"Perhaps the ones that never see you do. Scul ions, stable boys – but I cannot live, knowing that I can never have you.† The princess looked Damon over, blushed, gazed for a moment into his eyes†¦and then she bit him. â€Å"I’l get Stefan to go down to the root cel ar,†Elena said to Meredith, who was angrily thumbing tears out of her eyes. â€Å"You know we can’t do that. With the police right here in the house – â€Å" â€Å"Then I’ll do it – â€Å" â€Å"You can’t! You know you can’t, Elena, or you wouldn’t have come to me!† Elena looked at her friend closely. â€Å"Meredith, you’ve been donating blood al along,†she whispered. â€Å"You never seemed even slightly bothered†¦Ã¢â‚¬  â€Å"He only took a tiny bit – always less from me than anyone. And always from my arm. I just pretended I was having blood drawn at the doctor’s. No problem. It wasn’t even bad with Damon back in the Dark Dimension.† â€Å"But now†¦Ã¢â‚¬ Elena blinked. â€Å"Now – what?† â€Å"Now,†Meredith said with a faraway expression, â€Å"Stefan knows that I’m a hunter-slayer. That I even have a fighting stave. And now I have to†¦to submit to†¦Ã¢â‚¬  Elena had gooseflesh. She felt as if the distance from her to Meredith in the room was getting larger. â€Å"A hunter-slayer?†she said, bewildered. â€Å"And what’s a fighting stave?† â€Å"There’s no time to explain now! Oh, Elena†¦Ã¢â‚¬  If Plan A was Meredith and Plan B was Matt, there was real y no choice. Plan C had to be Elena herself. Her blood was much stronger than anyone else’s anyway, so ful of Power that Stefan would only need a – â€Å"No!†Meredith whispered right in Elena’s ear, somehow managing to hiss a word without a single sibilant. â€Å"They’re coming down the stairs. We have to find Stefan now! Can you tel him to meet me in the little bedroom behind the parlor?† â€Å"Yes, but – â€Å" â€Å"Do it!† And I stil don’t know what a fighting stave is, Elena thought, al owing Meredith to take her arms and propel her toward the bedroom. But I know what a â€Å"hunter-slayer†sounds like, and I definitely don’t like it. And that weapon – it makes a stake look like a plastic picnic knife. Stil , she sent to Stefan, who was fol owing the sheriffs downstairs: Meredith is going to donate as much blood as you need to Influence them. There’s no time to argue. Come here fast and for God’s sake look cheerful and reassuring. Stefan didn’t sound cooperative. I can’t take enough from her for our minds to touch. It might – Elena lost her temper. She was frightened; she was suspicious of one of her two best friends – a horrible feeling – and she was desperate. She needed Stefan to do just as she said. Get here fast! was al she projected, but she had the feeling that she’d hit him with al of the feelings ful force, because he suddenly turned concerned and gentle. I will, love, he said simply. While the female police officer was searching the kitchen and the male the living room, Stefan stepped into the smal first-floor guest room, with its single rumpled bed. The lamps were turned off but with his night vision he could see Elena and Meredith perfectly wel by the curtains. Meredith was holding herself as stiffly as an acrophobic bungee jumper. Take all you need without permanently harming her – and try to put her to sleep, too. And don’t invade her mind too deeply – I’ll take care of it. You’d better get out in the hallway, let them see at least one of us, love, Stefan replied soundlessly. Elena was obviously simultaneously frightened for and defensive about her friend and had sped right into micromanagement mode. While this was usual y a good thing, if there was one thing Stefan knew about – even if it was the only thing he knew – it was taking blood. â€Å"I want to ask for peace between our families,†he said, reaching one hand toward Meredith. She hesitated and Stefan, even trying his hardest, could not help but hearing her thoughts, like smal , scuttling creatures at the base of her mind. What was she committing herself to? In what sense did he mean family? It’s really just a formality, he told her, trying to gain ground on another front: her acceptance of the touch of his thoughts to hers. Never mind it. â€Å"No,†Meredith said. â€Å"It’s important. I want to trust you, Stefan. Only you, but†¦I didn’t get the stave until after Klaus was dead.† He thought swiftly. â€Å"Then you didn’t know what you were – â€Å" â€Å"No. I knew. But my parents were never active. It was Grandpa who told me about the stave.† Stefan felt a surge of unexpected pleasure. â€Å"So your grandfather’s better now?† â€Å"No†¦sort of.†Meredith’s thoughts were confusing. His voice changed, she was thinking. Stefan was truly happy that Grandpa’s better. Even most humans wouldn’t care – not really. â€Å"Of course I care,†Stefan said. â€Å"For one thing, he helped save al our lives – and the town. For another, he’s a very brave man – he must have been – to survive an attack by an Old One.† Suddenly, Meredith’s cold hand was around his wrist and words were tumbling from her lips in a rush that Stefan could barely understand. But her thoughts stood bright and clear under those words, and through them he got the meaning. â€Å"Al I can know about what happened when I was very young is what I’ve been told. My parents told me things. My parents changed my birthday – they actual y changed the day we celebrate my birthday on – because a vampire attacked my grandpa, and then my grandpa tried to kil me. They’ve always said that. But how do they know? They weren’t there – that’s part of what they say. And what’s more likely, that my grandpa attacked me or that the vampire did?†She stopped, panting, trembling al over like a white-tailed doe caught in the forest. Caught, and thinking she was doomed, and unable to run. Stefan put out a hand that he deliberately made warm around Meredith’s cold one. â€Å"I won’t attack you,†he said simply. â€Å"And I won’t disturb any old memories. Good enough?† Meredith nodded. After her cathartic story Stefan knew she wanted as few words as possible. â€Å"Don’t be afraid,†he murmured, just as he had thought the soothing phrase into the mind of many an animal he’d chased through the Old Wood. It’s all right. There’s no reason to fear me. She couldn’t help being afraid, but Stefan soothed her as he soothed the forest animals, drawing her into the darkest shadow of the room, calming her with soft words even as his canines screamed at him to bite. He had to fold down the side of her blouse to expose her long, olive-skinned column of neck, and as he did the calming words turned into soft endearments and the kind of reassuring noises he would use to comfort a baby. And at last, when Meredith’s breathing had slowed and evened and her eyes had drifted shut, he used the greatest of care to slide his aching fangs into her artery. Meredith barely quivered. Everything was softness as he easily skimmed over the surface of her mind, too, seeing only what he already knew about her: her life with Elena and Bonnie and Caroline. Parties and school, plans and ambitions. Picnics. A swimming hole. Laughter. Tranquility that spread out like a great pool. The need for calm, for control. Al this stretching back as far as she could remember†¦ The farthest depths that she could remember were here at the center†¦where there was a sudden plunging dip. Stefan had promised himself he would not go deeply into her mind, but he was being pul ed, helpless, being dragged down by the whirlpool. The waters closed over his head and he was drawn at tremendous speed to the very depths of a second pool, this one not composed of tranquility, but of rage and fear. And then he saw what had happened, what was happening, what would forever be happening – there at Meredith’s stil center. How to cite The Return: Midnight Chapter 10, Essay examples