Wednesday, October 23, 2019
Gautam Mishra
In addition to his various roles and responsibilities at Wharton, Professor Fader co-founded a predictive analytics firm (Zodiac) in 2015, which was sold to Nike in 2018. He then co-founded (and continues to run) Theta Equity Partners to commercialize his more recent work on “customer-based corporate valuation.”
Fader is the author of Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage and coauthor with Sarah E. Toms of the book The Customer Centricity Playbook. He has been quoted or featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Washington Post, and on NPR, among other media. In 2017, Professor Fader was named by Advertising Age as one of its inaugural “25 Marketing Technology Trailblazers,” and was the only academic on the list.
Professor Fader will discuss new ways of valuing corporations from the "bottom up" — i.e., determining the forward-looking financial valuation of the customer base — as a complementary perspective to the standard "top down" methodologies that dominate current valuation practice. This approach is gaining increasing interest and adoption among a variety of functional areas both inside corporations (e.g., business development, accounting and finance, marketing) and outside of them (e.g., private equity, venture capital, shareholder lawsuits). Customer-based corporate valuation (CBCV) is driving a meaningful shift away from the dangerous (but common) mindset of “growth at all costs” towards revenue durability and unit economics.
This session will introduce CBCV by first showing how it fits within traditional valuation approaches, then applying it to several publicly traded companies. These examples highlight the growing ability of CBCV to move markets, making it a crucially important methodology for executives and investors to understand and utilize.
Beyond the award-winning academic research on CBCV, Professor Fader will also briefly discuss how he is commercializing and popularizing it through Theta Equity Partners (https://www.thetaequity.com/), a startup that he recently co-founded.
