Adopting Elixir

The Acquisition of icanmakeitbetter

Our first story is one of acquisition. We tell this tale because acquisitions highlight the tensions between risk versus reward at the heart of every other adoption story. It starts with an entrepreneur, a few slices of pizza, and a dirty napkin. You see, icanmakeitbetter was a tech startup.

In 2011, Paul Janowitz was a young entrepreneur with a growing market research company and an idea. He came to understand that asking folks the best questions, even with excellent effort and world-class analysis, wouldn’t mean anything if you asked the wrong people. He met with Bruce Tate over pizza to talk about ways to automate the process of building research communities to find and engage the best customers. They brainstormed ...