What makes a business a success? Is it a great idea? Access to funding? Great staff? Although an innovative idea, money and an awesome team can be instrumental, in truth, there are many founders who face extraordinary odds (more than 50% of businesses fail in the first three years) and somehow manage to power through.

Technology is often discussed among loyalty marketers as an integral way to magnify customer engagement, customer experience, and customer loyalty. But, technology can also have a counter-productive effect.

“Growth hacking” is a new term for many branding professionals but a long held practice among the best marketers and product managers in Silicon Valley. With traditional media fading and the onslaught of mass customization and niching on the web, marketing as we’ve known it for the past 100 years is in a stage of transition – which means we have to become more creative about how we approach brand strategy.

By every standard measurement of business success, Decipher has excelled over the last several years.

It wasn’t an easy road. My partners launched the firm in San Francisco in 2000 during the height of the “dot com” boom, only to nearly go under during the crash a few years later when several of their large technology clients went belly up. They didn’t give up.