From Bulls to Silicon Valley like Wildfire

Victoria Ransom

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Kiwi Victoria Ransom has joined Silicon Valley's elite after securing US$4 million (NZ$5.6m) from "tier one" venture capital group Summit Partners and angel investors for a minority stake in social media marketing company Wildfire Interactive.

Ms Ransom, 34, who grew up near Bulls and now lives in San Francisco, says software developed by Wildfire has been used to manage more than 30,000 campaigns on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. She founded the company less than three years ago with her partner, Alain Chuard.

The online campaigns include a Facebook competition that invited Indonesians to suggest what clothes president Barack Obama should wear and what he should eat during his postponed state visit to Indonesia, originally scheduled for March, and to enter a draw to an event attended by Mr Obama.

"There were tens of thousands of entries and I believe the US embassy site in Jakarta has more Facebook friends than any other US embassy in the world."

Wildfire's software lets organisations run competitions and polls and offer vouchers through social media sites.

Campaigns can be embedded within Facebook, which also invested in Wildfire after it beat out 600 entries to win a US$450,000 competition for application developers in 2008.

"Facebook is a big part of what we do. What we have created is software to help businesses with their social media marketing, so they can use our technology on a self-service basis to set up different kinds of engaging social media campaigns they can publish to their Facebook page, website or Twitter," Ms Ransom says.

"In a few easy steps they can set up a coupon campaign that is actually an application living within Facebook, so all the feeds and friend invites and viral channels that are available in Facebook and Twitter can be embedded into the campaign."

The software has been used for New Zealand campaigns, such as one to promote Moro bars involving the All Blacks.

Ms Ransom says US games company Electronic Arts has used Wildfire's software to run a promotion that invites people to submit their ideal "kill sequence" in its Dead Space 2 computer game. "The winner gets their image to be one of the characters in the game."

The size of the shareholding acquired by Summit Partners and angel investors Jeff Clavier, Aydin Senkut and Gary Vaynerchuk is confidential, but Ms Ransom says she is very happy with the valuation attributed to Wildfire.

Wildfire employs 25 staff and Ms Ransom expects it will use the fresh equity to double or triple its staff numbers by the end of the year. "There are a lot of new directions we are going to take the technology in. We are continually building out our platform to become `the' self-service platform for companies to fulfil their social media marketing needs in a way that is easy, affordable and scalable."

The company employs 10 developers, including three based in Wellington, and will look out for talent here, she says.

"If you are a technology company, one of the things you constantly need to do is find good developers. It is pretty competitive in Silicon Valley."

Ms Ransom believes Wildfire could be based anywhere, but being in Silicon Valley has had some benefits. "This is the hub of the social media world. Our offices are just down the road from Facebook."

She hopes to return to New Zealand one day.

"It is not in the immediate plan. We are full on building the company. But I'd love to think I would be returning there at some point."

- © Fairfax NZ News