今年夏天的一个早晨，维多利亚•兰瑟姆和阿兰•查得将他们的本田思域车开进了谷歌（Google）的山景城总部。四年来，他们的社交营销初创企业Wildfire已经发展到了近400名员工和2.1万名客户，并与Facebook建立了紧密的联系。现在，谷歌也希望参与进来。

    1个小时后，一群谷歌高级经理报出了详细出价；据称是3.50亿美元，外加1亿美元的留任奖金。“当时我想，我可能很长时间都忘不了这一刻，”36岁的兰瑟姆说。

    兰瑟姆在正确的时间和地点，成立了一家正确的企业。Wildfire是由兰瑟姆和她当时的合伙人、如今的未婚夫阿兰•查得共同创立，属于企业社交软件公司，专门帮助各种品牌在社交网络上到达用户。今年早些时间，三个月时间内有半数企业社交软件公司被收购。5月份甲骨文（Oracle）斥资3亿美元收购了Vitrue，6月份Salesforce.com出资7亿美元收购了Buddy Media。接着7月份，搜索巨头谷歌差点错过机会，最终据称是付了3.50亿美元收购Wildfire。

    在大多数公司都还没有认真对待社交网络之时，兰瑟姆和查得很早就看到了Wildfire的市场需求，他们打造了一家极富竞争力的企业，待价而沽。这样极富远见的策略，加上坚持不懈，让兰瑟姆在《财富》杂志40位40岁以下商界精英榜单中与Buddy Media的共同创始人迈克尔•拉泽罗并列一席。而且，这个故事不是始于硅谷，而是在新西兰。

    兰瑟姆自小在新西兰北岛一个只有65位常住居民的乡村Scott's Ferry中长大。她的父亲是一位芦笋种植户，母亲是一家农用设备公司的办公室主任。为了赚些零花钱，兰瑟姆在家里的地里帮忙摘芦笋，装上一辆红色拖车，卖给住在Rangitikei河岸附近的渔民。

    青少年时期的兰瑟姆开始向往外面的世界，17岁时她拿到了一份奖学金，离开新西兰前往美国。后来，她进入明尼苏达州的马卡莱斯特学院（Macalester College），成了家族中第一个大学生。她遇到了专业滑雪运动员查得，后来成为了她的商业伙伴以及未婚夫。兰瑟姆在华尔街短暂工作过一段时间，担任摩根士丹利（Morgan Stanley）的传媒分析师，后来决定自己闯一闯。她说：“经过一轮又一轮的裁员后，我相信生活中应该有有更美好的东西。” 2001年，有一次她正在筹划一次度假，在互联网上搜索冲浪营，寻找探索旅游地的新方式。结果什么也没找到，她和当时身为所罗门美邦(Salomon Smith Barney)分析师的查得决定建立自己的旅行公司，专注于他们热爱的滑雪和其他活动。

    他们在布鲁克林Fort Greene的公寓里，利用晚上和周末的时间写出了商业计划书，包括带领年龄20-45岁的小队旅行者前往偏远目的地。2001年，他们放弃了在银行业的工作，前往新西兰，成立了自己的公司。他们在网吧、青年旅社以及Lambert的后排座椅上办公。Lambert是他们的1980年丰田卡罗拉，以一位滑雪伙伴的名字命名。他们将公司命名为Access Trips，2002年推出了首款产品：新西兰南岛14日冲浪滑雪之旅。

    On a summer morning earlier this year, Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard pulled their Honda Civic into Google's Mountain View headquarters. Over four years they had grown Wildfire, their social marketing startup, to nearly 400 people, 21,000 clients, and had become closely tied with Facebook. Google wanted in.

    An hour later, a team of senior Google (GOOG) executives shared details of their offer, reported at $350 million plus $100 million in retention bonuses. "That's when I thought, 'I'm going to remember this for a very long time,'" says Ransom, 36.

    Ransom was in the right place at the right time with the right entrepreneurial play. The company she'd founded with her then partner and now fiancé Alain Chuard, Wildfire, was one of a series of enterprise social software companies that specialized in helping brands reach customers over social networks. In the space of three months, half of them got bought earlier this year. Oracle (ORCL) shelled out $300 million for Vitrue in May, and Salesforce.com paid $700 million for Buddy Media in June. Then in July, before the search giant missed its chance, Google paid the reported $350 million for Wildfire.

    The story of how Ransom and Chuard saw a need for Wildfire long before most companies took social networking seriously, and then built a business strong enough to command that high price, is one of smart strategy paired with flat-out tenacity— the stuff that earned Ransom, who served as the company's CEO, a spot on Fortune's 40 Under 40 (she shares a spot with Buddy Media cofounder Michael Lazerow). It begins not in Silicon Valley, but in New Zealand.

    Ransom grew up in Scott's Ferry, a rural village of just 65 people on New Zealand's North Island. Her father worked as an asparagus farmer; her mother was the office manager at a farming equipment company. To earn pocket change, Ransom picked asparagus at the family farm, loaded it on a red wagon, and sold it to fishermen on the banks of the nearby Rangitikei River.

    As a teenager, Ransom grew restless, and at age 17 she won a scholarship and left New Zealand for the United States. At Minnesota's Macalester College, she became the first member of her family to earn a college degree. She also met Chuard, a professional snowboarder who would later become her business partner, and eventually her fiancé. After a short stint on Wall Street, where she worked as media analyst for Morgan Stanley, Ransom struck out on her own. "Going through round after round of layoffs, I decided that there had to be something better in life," she says. In 2001, she was planning a vacation, searching the Web for surf camps that offered a way to explore the country she'd be visiting. Finding none, she and Chuard— then an analyst at Salomon Smith Barney— decided to start their own travel company, focusing on snowboarding and other activities they loved.

    At night and on weekends from their Fort Greene, Brooklyn apartment, they wrote a plan for their business, which involved taking small groups of travelers, age 20 to 45, to remote destinations. In 2001 they quit their banking jobs, moved to New Zealand, and built the company while working out of Internet cafes, youth hostels, and the back seat of "Lambert," their 1980 Toyota Corolla named for one of their snowboarding pals. They called their venture Access Trips, and in 2002 launched their first product: a 14-day ski and snowboard trip on New Zealand's South Island.

    几年后，兰瑟姆和查得上了MBA，查得在斯坦福大学（Stanford），她在哈佛大学（Harvard），在那里他们开始尝试着在网上推广Access Trips。他们决定在Facebook上提供一次免费旅行，但找不到什么软件能实现这一点。因此，他们勾勒出了所需的软件功能——不仅可用于Access Trips，也能用于其他品牌——并在爱沙尼亚雇佣了开发人员制作软件。2008年，他们建立了另一家公司Wildfire，提供一款可下载的应用软件，允许用户设计抽奖、竞赛和其他促销方式，并在Facebook上运行，无需再雇佣编程员。客户很快就从夫妻店发展到了索尼(Sony)和联合利华(Unilever)这样的跨国大公司。客户支付的费用低到5美元/次、0.99美元/天，高到1.5万美元由Wildfire设计和执行的整套推广活动不等。

    2008年秋季时社交媒体还在增长，但华尔街危机重重，投资者不愿进行交易。兰瑟姆和查得竭力维持Wildfire的运转，一直在自家的客厅里工作，直到能搬进一家墨西哥熟食店楼上的办公室。他们以低成本方式组建了一支销售团队，雇佣应届毕业生寻找和提供销售机会，给资深销售人员支付最低基本工资加丰厚的佣金。一年内Wildfire就实现了盈利，没有对外筹一分钱。(2010年7月，兰瑟姆和查得卖掉了Access Trips。)

    兰瑟姆和查得还努力与Facebook建立关系。首先，他们通过在Facebook工作的商学院朋友，阐明Wildfire能让Facebook成为更有效的营销工具。然后，为Facebook的法律和国际增长业务进行了营销推广。他们用4个月时间争取并得到了Facebook内部创业孵化器fbFund 25万美元的拨款。(甚至连他们的员工也与Facebook有关联:他们甚至雇佣了马克•扎克伯格的妹妹和妹夫。)

    Summit Partners、500 Startups等投资者很快跟进，向Wildfire注入了1400万美元。随着拥有更多资金，Wildfire进一步扩展了软件功能。如今，企业能追踪粉丝和关注者动态，监测顾客在Facebook和Twitter上是怎么说的，并进行其他社交媒体分析。

    Wildfire与Facebook的良好关系对于谷歌具有巨大的吸引力，谷歌曾经试图通过Google Buzz、Google Wave和Google Plus等产品，打造自己的社交平台，但成效有限。“谷歌感兴趣的是看看Facebook拥有什么样的数据，这项技术如何运行，了解Facebook如何与第三方共享社交用户信息，”弗雷斯特研究公司（Forrester Research）副总裁兼首席分析师奈特•艾略特表示。兰瑟姆和查得将继续在谷歌领导 Wildfire，向主管AdWords和谷歌其他广告产品的苏珊•沃西基汇报。兰瑟姆表示，几年后他们可能会再建一家公司或专注于慈善事业。

    随着Facebook和Twitter增长，对社交营销公司的需求也在增长，新一轮的初创企业收购方兴未艾。兰瑟姆从没想到过自己也会成为其中的一份子。“就拿谷歌来说，我们从未预料到会被收购，”她说。“我们一直想的都是打造一家伟大的公司，看看到底会怎样。”

    译者：早稻米

    After a few years, Ransom and Chuard entered MBA programs, he at Stanford and she at Harvard, where they experimented with new ways to promote Access Trips online. They decided to give away a free trip on Facebook, but couldn't find software to do so. So they sketched out how the software would work— both for Access Trips, and other brands— and hired developers in Estonia to build it. In 2008 they launched Wildfire as a separate business: a downloadable app that would allow users to design sweepstakes, contests and other promotions that could run on Facebook, without having to hire a programmer. Clients soon ranged from two-person catering shops to Sony and Unilever. They paid as little as $5 a promotion for $.99 a day, up to $15,000 for a campaign that Wildfire would design and execute.

    Although social media was growing in the fall of 2008, Wall Street was in turmoil and investors were reluctant to do deals. So Ransom and Chuard bootstrapped Wildfire, working out of their living room for as long as they could before moving to an office above a Mexican deli. They built a sales force on the cheap, hiring a mix of recent college graduates to prospect and pass along leads, and more senior salespeople, whom they paid minimal base salaries and a generous commission. Within a year Wildfire was profitable, without having raised a dollar in outside funding. (In July 2010 Ransom and Chuard sold Access Trips.)

    Ransom and Chuard worked hard to develop a relationship with Facebook (FB). First they tapped business school friends who worked there, and made the case that Wildfire could make Facebook a more effective marketing tool. Then they did marketing campaigns for Facebook's legal and international growth groups. They spent four months competing for— and winning— a $250,000 grant from fbFund, the company's in-house business incubator. (Even their staff has ties to Facebook: They eventually hired Mark Zuckerberg's brother-in-law and younger sister.)

    Investors like Summit Partners and 500 Startups soon followed, injecting $14 million into Wildfire. With the additional funding, Wildfire built out its software; companies can now track their fans and followers, monitor what customers are saying about them on Facebook and Twitter, and do other social media analysis.

    Wildfire's connection to Facebook is a huge draw for Google, which has tried with limited success to build its own social platform with products like Google Buzz, Google Wave and Google Plus. "What would be interesting to Google is seeing what kind of data Facebook has access to, having a peek at how the technology works, and understanding how Facebook is communicating information about social users to third parties," says Nate Elliott, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. At Google, Ransom and Chuard will continue to lead Wildfire, reporting to Susan Wojcicki, who runs AdWords and the rest of Google's advertising products. After a few years, Ransom says, they might start another company, or focus on philanthropy.

    As Facebook and Twitter grow, so has the demand for social marketing companies, hence the recent round of high-profile startup acquisitions. Ransom never expected be a part of that club. "In the case of Google, we were not looking to get acquired," she says. "It's always been, 'Let's just build a great business, and then let's see.'"