wewe - bloomreach inc.go.bloomreach.com/rs/243-xlw-551/images/bloomreach-we...wewe written by mike...
TRANSCRIPT
HOW A STARTUP BUILT A BUSINESS AND A CULTURE
IN ONE FELL SWOOP
WEWEWRITTEN BY MIKE CASSIDY
2
The arch of balloons outside the Mountain View
headquarters’ door — one-half BloomReach blue
and white, the other half orange, blue and red —
was the first sign that it would be a day unlike
any other in the life of a maturing startup.
The champagne and sparkling cider in the kitchen
refrigerator, combined with the CEO’s note the
previous day added to the intrigue.
“Guys — We have an important/exciting
announcement tomorrow — if you are based in
the Bay Area please be on time and in person at
9 a.m. (Plan for traffic and leave early.),” the email
from Raj De Datta said in part.
Something was up.
The all-hands meeting started promptly at 9 in
the morning in Mountain View. It was already
nighttime in Bangalore and evening in London.
Oh, it was evening in Amsterdam, too, a fact the
significance of which was about to become clear.
“This is going to be a big day for the company,”
De Datta told those in the Wreck Room and
others around the world who had joined by
teleconference. “This is going to profoundly affect
the industry, us and our shareholders.”
BloomReach was acquiring Amsterdam-based
Hippo, a content management system company
“I THINK WE DEFINITELY HAVE A VERY BIG OPPORTUNITY HERE. IT IS OUR TASK, FOR ALL OF US, TO GRAB IT AND MAKE IT REAL.”
Hippo Chief of Staff, Linda Neijenhuis
1
that would add to the company about 70 employees and
the capability to truly and comprehensively personalize
digital experiences.
Like its namesake animal, the Hippo deal was huge. It
was the marriage of two companies intent on making
the web a better place for everyone. Combining the
two technologies separated by an ocean would allow
the two teams to build the first open and intelligent
digital experience platform — a phrase made for a news
release, but also something those engaged in electronic
commerce and content had been clamoring for, without
even knowing how to describe what they wanted.
The promise of the new company would go a long way
toward “BloomReaching” the web, the founding goal
of the startup that was about to celebrate the eighth
anniversary of its launch. BloomReaching the web was
the idea of making every digital experience for every
individual user, meaningful and personally relevant, while
at the same time proving worthwhile for those doing
business on the web.
In a world where consumers are in control — where
digitally empowered users decide how, when and
where to shop and how, when and where to consume
information and content — it’s vital to be able to deliver
the right content to the right person on the right device
at the right time. That’s especially true when the right
device might be a laptop, smartphone, tablet, credit-
card reader, auto dashboard, kiosk, touch screen,
shopping cart, electronic sign or even arena scoreboard.
This was big, all right. And it was real.
22
Beyond their complementary technologies, the joining
of Hippo and BloomReach represented a harmonic
convergence of culture.
In that all-hands meeting, on what De Datta described
as “Day Zero,” he repeated the values that underpin
BloomReach’s culture: Own, Truth, Think, We and No
Drama. He told the assembled BloomReachers that the
company’s values were at the forefront of the talks with
Hippo, which was equally focused on connecting with
a company that shared its own long-held values. (You’d
expect no less from a company that list “beer and fun”
as two key pillars supporting the company.)
“The culture has been the driving force behind Hippo.
Product and culture at Hippo goes hand-in-hand,”
says Varia Makagonova, Hippo’s global communication
manager. “For all of us at Hippo, it’s really clear that we
wouldn’t have merged with another company if it didn’t
match our company values. That’s how important it is.”
In fact, it turns out, Hippo has a culture shorthand of
its own, one that is remarkably similar to BloomReach’s
— Committed (Own), Outspoken (Truth), Smart (Think),
Together (We), Humorous (No Drama).
Linda Neijenhuis remembers the day she realized the
cultural synchronicity between BloomReach and Hippo.
It was during the acquisition talks. The then-chief of staff
at Hippo was jogging in Amsterdam when BloomReach’s
Stella Treas texted her a copy of BloomReach’s values.
“And I was looking at my phone. I saw them and I had to
stop and send our values back right away because I was
“THERE ARE ALL KINDS OF DIFFERENT QUESTIONS THAT YOU OBVIOUSLY HAVE. BUT ESPECIALLY THE CULTURAL FIT BETWEEN THE COMPANIES WAS A CRITICAL ELEMENT, WHERE WE THOUGHT THIS COULD BE SUCCESSFUL.”
Hippo Co-founder, Tjeerd BrenninkmeijerZERO
3
struck by the similarity,” Neijenhuis says.
Keeping that corporate DNA front-and-center has kept
Hippo grounded and growing into a global enterprise still
run by its original founders — Jeroen Verberg, Arjé Cahn and
Tjeerd Brenninkmeijer.
Drawing the two companies together was the start of a new
chapter for BloomReach, De Datta said. Chapter 3, in fact, he
called it, laying out the earlier chapters like this:
Chapter 1 covered the first three years of the company’s life,
a time when BloomReach had one product that was focused
on organic search. Chapter 2 lasted the next four years, years
during which BloomReach added two more products — one
optimizing site search and the onsite experience and another
providing instant and actionable data for site merchandisers.
It seems so linear and logical when De Datta puts it that way.
But like any good story, there have been twists and turns
along the way.
4
It happens maybe a dozen times on any
given day in Silicon Valley — in kitchens,
living rooms, spare bedrooms and garages:
A founder, an entrepreneur, a dreamer,
an inventor, gathers kindred spirits and
together they launch a plan to build the
world’s next great company. How many of
them make it on any given day? One? Maybe
none? Starting a company is an exercise in
insanity; a gauntlet of fundraising, failure,
market forces and uncertainty.
What’s different about the companies that
bloom and reach their early potential while
setting a course for greater things? Maybe
many things, but one thing is different for
certain: Those that make it are built on well-
defined and deeply held values.
BloomReach’s day came on December
15, 2008. Co-founders Raj De Datta and
Ashutosh Garg were out to BloomReach the
web; to turn every web experience into a
fruitful and relevant act of discovery. But
before they called on an investor, drew
up a business plan, hired an employee or
penciled out a budget, they went to work
writing a manifesto — a description of
values by which they and those who joined
their company would live.
The co-founders barely knew each other
at that point, and yet, when they sat
5
down for their first meeting at Neto Caffè
on Mountain View’s Castro Street, they were
precisely aligned.
“I think I might have talked to him on day one,”
De Datta says of Garg. “I told him the story
about how I really feel like values are key to
building a great company. He said, that makes
sense. I said, how about if I write something
and send it to you? He said, sounds good. I
wrote that document. I emailed it to him that
night. We both signed off on it. It was done
by the next day.”
The culture document that resulted is the North
Star for every decision made at BloomReach,
Garg says. Whenever there is a question —
should I do A or B? — the values guide the way.
Truth. Own. We. Think. No Drama.
“We believe that it’s about all of us,” Garg says.
“We don’t want it to be about me or Raj or a
handful of folks. If we succeed, we succeed
together. If we fail, we fail together.”
From those values flow a way of working,
relating, selling and thinking. Together they are
the threads that hold the fabric together. This
book aims to tell the story of BloomReach and
Hippo and the story of what we believe through
our five essential values.
“WE BELIEVE IN THIS IDEA THAT EVERY INTERACTION THAT A CONSUMER HAS WITH EVERY DIGITAL EXPERIENCE SHOULD BE GREAT AND ON POINT, LEADING TO EXACTLY WHAT THEY ARE SEEKING, WHILE BEING PRODUCTIVE FOR THE PRODUCER OF THE DIGITAL EXPERIENCE.”
CEO, Raj De Datta
6
It’s amazing that BloomReach and Hippo share so many
strands of DNA, given that they were born a continent,
an ocean and a decade apart. Jeroen Verberg, Tjeerd
Brenninkmeijer and Arjé Cahn were students at the
University of Amsterdam in 1999 when they struck on
the idea of starting a company together.
Verberg had carried the entrepreneurial bug since he
was a 10-year-old kid, holding “business meetings”
with his grandfather and pouring him sparkling water
“cocktails” from the minibar in his bedroom, which was
outfitted with a large desk.
He soon launched a car wash business. Not just any car
wash business, a subscription car wash business.
“I tried to sell them on, instead of five euros, it would
be four, if you would get a subscription once a
month,” Verberg says.
Sales were slow. It might have been an idea before
its time.
“As a 10-year-old, I could think it was a better model,” he
says. “It was a better model for me, maybe.”
Verberg eventually turned his attention to a major
pain point at his house and went to work trying to
write a program that, given ingredients, would spit out
recipes, so his mom wouldn’t have to agonize over what
to cook for dinner.
“But I’m a lousy programmer,” he says. And it was before
the Internet, which meant entering all the recipes by
hand and, well, it didn’t pan out.
The fire still burned. And while finishing his masters at
the University of Amsterdam, Verberg started to focus
“EVERYBODY WANTED TO HAVE AN INTERNET COMPANY, SO THERE WAS NO ESCAPING THAT. I STARTED OUT WITH TJEERD. WE WERE LIKE, ‘OK, IT HAS TO BE SOMETHING AROUND THE INTERNET,’ AND WE WERE UNSURE OF WHAT IT NEEDED TO BE. AND TJEERD SAID, ‘WELL, ACTUALLY, I KNOW A GUY WHO KNOWS SOMETHING ABOUT COMPUTERS. MAYBE YOU SHOULD ASK HIM.’”
Hippo CEO and Co-founder, Jeroen Verberg,
7
Back in Mountain View, BloomReach co-founder
Ashutosh Garg had thought long and hard about the
problem of finding relevant information on the web. Sure,
there was Google, where he once worked, but Google
only got you so far. Google could get you to the New
York Times website, he liked to say, but if the New York
Times hadn’t done a good job of optimizing its site, how
were you supposed to find what was on the New York
Times website?
“Basically over time, what I realized is that information
is at the core of pretty much everything that happens
in society. A lack of information can not only hamper us,
but it can also limit our thinking,” Garg says. “In 2008,
when I started looking at this problem, I thought, the
information is out there. Finding it shouldn’t be so hard.”
on starting a company. It was 1999, near the peak of the
dotcom boom and it seemed every idea had a fighting
chance. But rather than start a dotcom or consumer-
facing internet company, Verberg and Brenninkmeijer
seized on the idea of building a company that
served other companies.
“Tjeerd and I were thinking: The companies that got
rich in the Gold Rush in California, were the companies
selling the shovels. If we build a shovel, maybe that’s a
better choice than doing a startup concept.”
Content management was the shovel. Brenninkmeijer
had already been thinking about the problem. He
was focused on sharing knowledge and was writing a
thesis exploring the concept. He came upon a paper
on the subject by Verberg while doing research and a
connection was made.
“We noticed that it, obviously, would be handy if
we had somebody on the team who is technically
capable of actually building the ideas that we had,”
Brenninkmeijer says.
He knew Cahn from the rowing club at school.
“I knew Arjé as a brilliant mind,” he says. And so
Brenninkmeijer introduced his rowing buddy to Verberg
and the team was in place.
8
That is the problem that he wanted to solve. But he
didn’t want to solve it alone and he didn’t want to solve
it with just any company. He wanted a company of
people who knew what they valued and who acted on
that knowledge — every day.
And so, armed with a set of core values and a common
goal, Garg and CEO Raj De Datta set out to build and
sell a machine that would understand the web and the
way people behaved on it in a deeper way than had ever
been achieved before.
“We know so much about the universe. We know so
much about the content,” Garg says. “But people are still
having a hard time finding what they’re looking for.”
“DATA IS JUST TELLING US WHAT’S THE FACT. SO THE CULTURE OF TRUTH AND TRANSPARENCY IS ABOUT DATA. THOSE THINGS ARE NOT IN CONFLICT WITH EACH OTHER. I WOULD SAY THEY ARE VERY WELL ALIGNED.”
Co-founder, Ashutosh Garg
It was a bold way to go, designing a machine
that would crawl the web and customers’
websites to build a deep understanding of
data, people, products and demand. No one
had done it. No one, it seemed, had even
tried. There is big and mind-boggling science
and technology behind BloomReach’s Web
Relevance Engine. But in the end, what it does
is match web users’ intent with web producers’
content. A match made in Mountain View and
Bangalore and sold and supported from offices
around the world, including Dallas, London,
Boston and Amsterdam.
Chief Technology Officer Amit Aggarwal
explains that most websites have systems
in place to manage web design and content,
but few focus on tapping into data in a way
that governs what to show any given user.
Few products, he says, manage the “data layer.”
9
“BloomReach wants to be the data layer of the Internet,”
Aggarwal says.
The Web Relevance Engine, or the WRE to those who
know and love it, relies on constant machine learning and
natural language processing to build a fulfilling digital
search experience and create a reason for consumers
to return again and again to a company’s website.
It is at the core of BloomReach’s Organic, Search,
Merchandising and Insights products. At the time this is
being written, the WRE processes 100 million web pages
and between five and 10 terabytes of data every day, all
while seeing 150 million consumer interactions.
The numbers are staggering. They also are a measure of
just how difficult the job of making the web relevant is.
“I TRULY BELIEVED THAT THE BLOOMREACH VISION WAS A STEP-CHANGE IN HOW WE ALGORITHMICALLY DEFINED INTENT. I DID NOT KNOW WE WERE GOING TO WIN OR THAT IT WAS GOING TO BE THIS HUGE, BUT I DID KNOW THAT DEFINING INTENT WAS THE FUTURE OF SEARCH AND, HAVING GIVEN DOZENS OF PRESENTATIONS AND WRITTEN HANDFULS OF WHITE PAPERS, ALL WITH THE TITLE, ‘THE FUTURE OF SEARCH,’ WHEN I SAW IT, I HAD TO BE A PART OF IT.”
Solutions Consultant Manley
10
“YOU GO PEEL THE NEXT LAYER OF THAT ONION AND THEN YOU SOLVE THE PROBLEM. EVERY SO OFTEN, IT STILL WILL NOT WORK. MORE OFTEN THAN NOT, YOU’VE NOT THOUGHT IT THROUGH. YOU MAY BE ON THE RIGHT PATH, BUT YOU MIGHT BE A FEW STEPS FROM THE GOAL. OR YOU MAY BE AT THE GOAL, BUT LOOKING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION.”
BloomReach Co-founder, Ashutosh Garg
11
When BloomReach first went to market with its first
product, it went with one firm belief: “I think it will work.
In fact, there is no reason it won’t work. In fact, I’m 100
percent confident,” Co-founder Ashutosh Garg explains.
Of course, the data could eventually say otherwise, but
leading with confidence means if anything goes wrong,
you look for extraneous factors and keep plugging. If you
start by saying, “Who knows? Let’s give it a try and see
what happens,” and your technology doesn’t work, then
you have your answer and you’re finished.
And as fate would have it, when BloomReach stood
up its very first customer, its technology worked
incredibly well.
“Better than expected,” Garg says. “That was a very
joyous moment.”
Emphasis on the “moment.” Or 24 hours. For 24 hours,
Organic Search worked brilliantly and then it didn’t.
The time to be joyful had passed. The time to be
confident endured.
Garg and CEO Raj De Datta had told the home goods
retailer that they were BloomReach’s first customer,
using a product no one else had used and that there
was no data to support the founders’ belief that it would
ultimately be successful.
“We gave them a call and told them, ‘Guess what?’ It’s
not working. Know we’ll keep you updated,” Garg says.
“We’ll keep trying new things. You will know at every step
what we are doing. Let’s work on it together.”
Garg says BloomReach went into peeling-the-onion
mode, digging into potential problems, fixing glitches
and digging deeper and bringing the system back to life.
It was a long slog — six weeks, Garg says, before he
knew the team had come up with the right solution for
that customer and for future customers.
But it was also valuable. It validated the formula for
building a product: Think through the problem; form
a solid vision for how to solve it and look to data for
verification.
“It was a good hypothesis,” Garg says of BloomReach’s
product. “We knew it would work. So, we kept
working on it.”
12
Back in Amsterdam, the Hippo founders made two
key decisions: They would build their company on
open-source software. And they would bootstrap
their operations rather than seek venture funding.
The internet was turning the world upside down.
Tjeerd Brenninkmeijer says the founders of what’s
become BloomReach Experience believed that
customers would value transparency and the
ability to work with and modify the code that
Hippo could offer.
Going open source would also save money,
something especially important to a company
funding its own operations. Like any responsible
startup, the Hippo team looked for ways to save a
few dollars here and there.
Which probably explains the company’s first
corporate headquarters in north Amsterdam.
“IN 1999, AT THAT TIME, YOU COULD BASICALLY GO TWO ROUTES: GET A LOT OF INVESTORS’ MONEY AND BUILD SOMETHING. OR YOU GO THE OTHER ROUTE: WE SHOULD BUILD A PRODUCT AND SEE IF IT’S ACTUALLY VIABLE.”
Hippo Co-founder, Jeroen Verberg
13
“It was actually an old a diamond factory,”
Brenninkmeijer says. “At that time it was a
studio, creating television shows. It was a big,
old complex.”
Hippo took a small office amid the bright
lights of the entertainment industry. It had its
moments. Like the night the doorbell rang and
Arjé Cahn sprung into action to answer it.
“And there was Katja Schuurman, standing
there,” Brenninkmeijer recalls.
Who’s Katja Schuurman?
“She was at the time the hottest woman in the
(entertainment) industry,” Brenninkmeijer says.
Was it a sign of Hippo’s own impending star turn
in the field of content management? Probably
not. But it’s safe to say that given its humble
renovated-factory beginnings, Hippo was
nothing, if not a diamond in the rough.
What kind of place would hire
a person without telling them
exactly what their job would
be? And what kind of person
would take such a job?
The short answer: A special
one. And no, not special,
as in crazy.
“A LOT OF THESE IDEAS WERE PIONEERED BY FACEBOOK AND GOOGLE, WHICH ARE VERY DIFFERENT COMPANIES THAN MOST COMPANIES. MAYBE IT’S UNIQUE FOR A COMPANY OF OUR SIZE IN THE ENTERPRISE SPACE TO TAKE SOME OF THOSE NEW IDEAS.”
Chief Technology Officer, Amit Aggarwal
14
It’s no secret that engineers are a little different from
the rest of the population. It’s not really the job they’re
interested in. It’s the challenge that comes with the job
and the challenge after that and after that.
Google and Facebook figured that out years ago. It’s
why Facebook hires engineers into a boot camp, where
they learn Facebook’s ropes and code and try their
hands at various projects to help them figure out what
they’d like to work on in their everyday job.
BloomReach takes a similar approach, one which Chief
Technology Officer Amit Aggarwal says is a little
different for a company that isn’t Facebook or Google
and is, in fact, miniscule by comparison.
“Traditionally, what engineering teams and what
companies have done is, you interview for a specific
team and you go to that team,” Aggarwal says. “We hire
generalists who can pretty much do anything and then
the fit is determined by what you’re interested in and the
need of the business. So, we’ve taken that idea, which is
a relatively new idea for engineering teams, and applied
it to BloomReach.”
In fact, why wouldn’t you want engineers to be working
on projects that they’re interested in — or even
passionate about?
Aggarwal says the strategy has contributed to building
a team of top engineers who embrace the idea of moving
from project to project, all while hammering away at an
irresistible challenge: making every digital interaction
relevant for every user, every time.
“Most companies are solving a problem, a specific
area,” he says. “The unique thing about BloomReach is
the diversity of things that we’re innovating on. We’re
obviously innovating on big data, that’s our DNA. We’re
also working on contributing to open-source projects
and infrastructure. We’re doing Cassandra and we’re
doing Solr. And we’re doing algorithms and we’re doing
entity extraction and we’re doing enterprise UI.”
When Aggarwal puts it that way, sort of makes you want
to dive right in.
15
The idea wasn’t ever to serve only e-commerce enterprises or to work only in the United
States. But you have to start somewhere. Raj De Datta and Ashutosh Garg had a company.
(The name would come later, inspired by a data structure known as a Bloom filter and
based on the co-founders’ desire to help content bloom and reach every person for
whom it is relevant). They simply needed a place to house their enterprise.
So in 2009, Garg and De Datta chose to open up shop in an uninspiring office
building at 530 University Avenue in Palo Alto, home of Plug and Play, a Silicon
Valley accelerator that has grown into a global hot house for start-ups.
MOUNTAIN VIEW
“YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND WHAT IT MEANS TO SET UP AN EXTERNAL ENTITY — A REMOTE SALES TEAM, SUPPORT CUSTOMERS IN DIFFERENT TIME ZONES, HOW TO SERVE MARKET-SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS. THERE ARE A BUNCH OF THINGS THAT BEING A GLOBAL COMPANY MEANS, SO FIGURING THAT OUT IN ONE MARKET SEEMS LOGICAL BEFORE YOU FEEL THAT YOU HAVE THE COMPETENCY TO COVER MORE THAN ONE MARKET.”
CEO, Raj De Datta
HI!
16
“It was a little, kind of cramped place,” says Joshua Levy,
an engineer and BloomReach’s second hire, “not the
most exciting location.”
The Silicon Valley office would make four moves — first
to the place on Castro, behind the Mediterranean Grill
House; then the spot across from the old Wienerschnitzel
on California Street; next came the El Camino Real office
and then the office at 82 Pioneer Way, the one adorned
with the balloon arch on Day Zero of Chapter 3.
Yes, all the moves were in Mountain View, in part, De
Datta has explained, because the deep technical
talent in Silicon Valley tends to gravitate toward the
Peninsula and South Bay, while more consumer-oriented
enterprises launch in San Francisco.
The Bangalore center was launched in 2012 by Technical
Chief Vinodh Kumar and Engineer Gagandeep Singh,
who Damayanti Ghosh, of the Bangalore talent team,
says left “cushy jobs at Google” to cast themselves
into the unknown.
This wasn’t going to be some body shop, opened in the
Silicon Valley tradition of doing the mundane design
work overseas on the cheap. Bangalore would work on
core innovation.
“Vinodh and Gagan had the guts in them to believe the
technology vision and the product vision of Raj and Ashu
— and also they were confident enough to execute on
their abilities,” Ghosh says. “They amassed people who
were like-minded; people who believed in building stuff,
who believed in getting products to run and function.”
“Cushy” might be one way to look at a big company,
but Kumar says big can also mean a diminished role for
those who do the work.
“If you go to a big company, the company is so big that
you’ll end up on a team that owns a small component
and you’ll work in some small part of the component,
without understanding the big picture,” he says. “Here
you work on things from end-to-end. You learn a lot. You
are creating a direct impact on the company.”
INDIA
17
By the spring of 2014, it was time to take London and
officially open BloomReach’s first overseas sales office.
The United Kingdom represented an English-speaking
region that was already ahead of the United States
when it came to e-commerce. Not only that, but it was a
gateway to the rest of Europe and a market that would
considerably expand BloomReach’s prospects.
“The UK is pure greenfield,” says Manley, a London-
based solutions consultant, who goes by just Manley.
“To begin with, we just need people to know about us.
It’s about being believed in.”
LONDON
Staying connected
But for all the remote offices in the new BloomReach,
including offices in Bangalore, Dallas, Amsterdam,
Boston — and for BloomReachers who work remotely
in New York, Chicago, Toronto and elsewhere — the
challenge remains: How to feel a part of the mothership
from so far away.
Those who live with the challenge say there is nothing
like keeping face-to-face contact.
“Meeting someone face-to-face,” Ghosh says, “makes it
so much easier to really bond with that person.”
That’s precisely why BloomReachers stationed around
the world make regular trips to Mountain View.
And it’s why BloomReach executives travel the world to
check in with their far-flung co-workers.
18
“IT’S A HUGE HURDLE, AS A YOUNG COMPANY TO HIRE EMPLOYEES. OUR AMBITIONS WERE VERY MUCH ALIGNED. WE WANTED TO MAKE IT BIG.”
19
Like Raj De Datta and Ashutosh Garg with
BloomReach, the Hippo founders had very high
standards for who they were going to hire to
join them in building a company.
“My thing has always been to try to hire
people better than myself,” Jeroen Verberg
says. “We were very strict. Everyone we hired,
we did a series of interviews, but we also did
assignments. You had to present something
that you built for engineering.”
The reason for the assignment was similar to
Garg’s belief that a job candidate ought to be
asked to teach his or her interviewer something.
“Our reasoning was, ‘OK, the engineering bit, it’s
great to write code. But the important thing is
that you are open to the scrutiny of others. If
you’re working in an open-source environment,
you have to be able to do that,” Verberg says.
The early hires are an incredibly important
foundation. The first five hires are why the next
five hires come.
“Everybody just wants to work with super smart
people,” Verberg says. “It’s really what they
came for and why they stay so long. They know
it’s very unlikely that they’re going to find a
smarter team anywhere else.”
For Hippo, the assignment requirement seemed
to work well. But even early on the company
was growing fast — a conference darling, an
enterprise destined for the Deloitte Fast 50.
It eventually became harder to find enough
people to feed the growing beast.
“We just needed people and we just, at some
point said, ‘OK, we cannot find the talent so
we’re just going to hire this guy.’ We had three
or four people who were just not as good as the
others and that hurt.”
Undoing bad hires is a tricky business, more
so in Europe than in the United States, which
offers workers fewer protections. Verberg knew
he had to act, but exactly how was still a
question that needed to be answered.
20
DJ, known to almost no one as Darren Johnson, was
born to sell. How into sales is he?
When BloomReach’s head of sales makes an offer to a
candidate, it comes with an odd sales pitch — a pitch
aimed at convincing the candidate not to take the job.
“Before I send you a formal offer,” he told a key hire, “I
want to book an hour with you and I’m going to sell you
off of this job. I’m going to tell you all the reasons why
this place is a fuck show.”
He can explain. BloomReach sells some complicated
products into a market that is constantly roiled by
change — and one in which customers increasingly feel
empowered to set the terms of any deal.
Enterprise software sales is nothing like it was even a
few years ago. No more do you sell a company a box
of software and some services to get it up and running
and then walk away. Software as a service — or SaaS
as it’s known — is in the cloud. It encourages demands
for trial runs to test for value. The price is sometimes
“I FEEL LIKE THERE IS THIS PERPETUAL T E N S I O N B E T W E E N B E C O M I N G A SCALABLE PROCESS-DRIVEN COMPANY AND CONTINUING TO BE INNOVATIVE — AND PERPETUAL CHANGE. AND THOSE THINGS ARE AT ODDS, CONSTANTLY.”
Chief Sales Officer, Darren Johnson (DJ)
21
performance based. It’s sold by subscription, a year at a
time, if you’re lucky.
DJ describes the sales shift in terms of romantic
relationships. In the old days, say 2005, inking an
enterprise software deal was like getting married in
the Catholic Church, he says. There was a certain
expectation of permanence. But now, with digital tools in
the cloud, the expectation is flexibility — turn it up, turn
it off, fire it up, shut it down.
“No one ever wants to commit. We’ve gone from hard-
core Catholicism, fast forward to Tinder,” he says. “Now
the market is saying, I’ll buy your shit. I’ll never commit to
it. In fact, I’ll only commit to 30 days at a time. I’ll only
pay for what I use. And I’ll only pay if I can validate, with
data, the incremental value to my business.”
It’s a market shift that has resulted in demands for pilot
programs to test the efficacy of BloomReach products
and the need to constantly sell. Selling enterprise SaaS,
you see, is like being a politician with a two-year term.
The campaign never ends.
And so, it is not DJ’s goal to scare off every person who
accepts a sales job offer from BloomReach. Instead, he
wants them to know what they are in for: A corporate
culture that thrives on — and demands — constant
change, at the same time it pushes for scalable products
and predictable processes.
And yet, he says, he’s stayed at BloomReach longer than
he’s stayed in any other sales job.
Sure, part of it is the people — and he has a very DJ way
of explaining that.
“Everyone here is freakin’ smart as shit. All they
want to do is make the company succeed, not their
individual fiefdom.”
But more than that, it’s the products. DJ says he’s spent
a career selling products with the promise that they
would improve companies’ digital businesses. And the
promise had always outstripped reality. The problem had
always been too big; too complex for tools that required
considerable human intervention to set rules and tune
results — until BloomReach sicced machine learning on
the problem.
“I’ve been chasing this dragon for, I don’t know, since
‘97, ‘96? Good lord. I’ve been chasing the same dragon
for 20 years and that dragon is the promise of digital
marketing,” he says. “I can more effectively and more
efficiently, and most important, more measurably, deliver
on digital marketing.”
And so, he’s finally got that dragon by the tail. Best
to hold on tight.
22
part of the city’s outer wall, it had been converted to a
restaurant/cafe with meeting rooms. It was a remnant
of the past and the ideal spot to chart the future.
“I kind of assembled a council of engineers,” he says.
“We had a whole day session.”
The group talked and brainstormed and filled the walls
with sticky notes, some useful, some not, but all in the
interest of charting a new course.
“We sat in the castle the whole day, listening to
engineering trying to identify the problem. It took
probably like six hours before we kind of agreed on the
naming and the categorization of the problems.”
One of the suggestions was to fire faster.
“Which is uncommon, I think, for employees to tell their
boss,” Verberg says. “It was a very important lesson that
All companies have growing pains and the pain is most
acute when the growing is going fast. As Hippo closed
in on its eighth year, company leaders knew they had to
address challenges brought on by their rapid pace of
hiring and, frankly, their loosening of standards.
Two top performers had decided to leave and CEO
Jeroen Verberg knew he had to do something.
Something dramatic.
The Waag, an imposing 15th century fortress in the
center of Amsterdam, fit the bill for dramatic. Once
“ T H E R E A R E A LWAYS D I F F I CU LT I E S , BUT THAT IS ALSO THE CHALLENGING PA R T . I F T H E R E W E R E N ’ T A N Y DIFFICULTIES, THEN A LOT OF PEOPLE WOULD HAVE LEFT.”
Chief of Staff, Linda Neijenhuis
23
people really need smart people around them.”
The assignments during interviews were back. Prospective sales
hires would go through a similar test.
“They have to pitch and sell Hippo to us,” Verberg says. “They
get the deck and they have to sell it.”
No one who starts a business expects it to magically propel
itself forward with no issues, no rough patches. But the clichés
tend to be repeated again and again for a reason. What doesn’t
kill you will make you stronger. If you’re not making mistakes,
you’re not trying hard enough.
Sure, the dark days come along, says Linda Neijenhuis, Hippo’s
chief of staff. That they come along is not important, it’s how a
team of people responds when they do that matters.
“I think we have a lot of curious and ambitious people here,”
she says.
PLACEHOLDER
IMAGE
24
“IN A WORLD OF INCREASING VIRTUAL COMMUNICATIONS, IRONICALLY, YOUR OFFICE SPACE IS AS IMPORTANT AS IT EVER WAS. IT REPRESENTS EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU — YOUR VALUES, YOUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH PEOPLE, THE KIND OF PEOPLE YOU WANT TO RECRUIT AND THE PRIORITIES YOU HAVE.”
CEO, Raj De Datta, “Gladiator Leadership” Blog
When the Mountain View Fire Department rolled up to BloomReach in November 2013, the
only good news was that nothing was on fire. It was time for a surprise safety inspection.
Like a typical start-up, BloomReach wasn’t necessarily a place where neatness counted.
And as far as setting up an office, sometimes speed won over style. Need another
electrical outlet? MacGyver it.
25
The office desks were arranged in pods of four, creating
a square with a gaping open space in the middle. And
you know how office workers abhor a vacuum.
“So in the middle space, all this junk would sit,
everywhere,” says Brian Bell, who was four months into
his job as office manager at the time. And there weren’t
enough power outlets. The solution was to daisy chain a
remarkable number of power strips together.
“Every single pod: It was socket, plugged into a socket.
It was like ‘A Christmas Story,’ where he plugs in plugs on
top of plugs. It was dusty and there was crap on top of
everything and it was horrible.”
There wasn’t a power strip in the place without several
other power strips plugged into it.
The fire department didn’t care for the incendiary
situation. The inspectors gave Bell a matter of weeks to
fix it. And so with a few others, he came up with a plan.
Why not put up some short cubicles — pony walls, really,
about a foot taller than the desks — to hide the mess,
offer some privacy and provide outlets?
“Me, in all my wisdom, thought this would be a great
time to have just mini — I don’t want to call them walls
— just little things that we’d put up and everybody
would have a plug.”
The work involved “tons of people” working through the
Christmas holiday week, Bell recalls.
And by New Year’s Day, the project was all but finished;
which coincided with CEO Raj De Datta’s visit to the
practically empty office. Walls are not De Datta’s thing.
Not at all.
The look of the office reflects the company culture, De
Datta says. Executives and worker bees sitting together
reflects “We.” Scattered whiteboards for brainstorming
is “Think.” And no walls, including little ones, is a
nod to truth, transparency and open communication.
The walls had to go.
“I think it was like Jan. 2,” Bell says. “I get a call at 7 p.m.
and it’s, ‘Hey Brian.’ He’s real calm. ‘It’s Raj here. I just
wanted to talk about what’s going on in the office. How
much would it cost to take all this down?’”
26
It is an article of faith in Silicon Valley that failure
is the first step on the path to success. The truth
is, failure can just as easily be the last step on
the path to, well, failure. It’s all about what you
do when you fail.
Digital search is huge and many faceted. There
is organic search, paid search, site search and an
array of devices and channels on which people
conduct those searches. The scope of search
creates the need to choose: What to tackle next?
In the summer of 2013, with BloomReach firing on
all cylinders, the company picked its next product.
The opportunity for the product, which we’re not
naming for proprietary reasons, was huge. The full
court press was on. The engineering team had a
first version built, but something wasn’t right.
“THE CREATION PROCESS IS A COMBINATION OF WILL AND OBJECTIVITY; COMMITMENT AND OBJECTIVITY AND BEING ABLE TO GO BACK AND FORTH. THERE IS A TIME FOR, ‘GUYS, WE’RE JUST GOING TO GET THIS DONE.’ AND THERE IS A TIME FOR, ‘I COULD PUSH YOU GUYS TO WORK ANOTHER 20 HOURS A DAY AND THE ANSWER WON’T CHANGE.’”
CEO, Raj De Datta
RIP
27
Sometimes stopping something is as hard as
getting something started. Killing your babies,
they call it; a project you love, you have great
hopes for, you believe in. It can be hard to see
past all that.
“We were working on it, people working day and
night,” CEO Raj De Datta recalls. “And at some
point, my co-founder and I said the fundamental
approach is not going to work. We’ve got to scrap
it. Adding a feature or two isn’t going to change
it. Finding a customer isn’t going to change it. We
killed the project.
“It was disappointing, especially to those who put
in the time and the effort. The key to managing
disappointment is communication,” De Datta says.
“People have the ability to handle bad news much
better than you expect them to. So, if you just
explain, ‘Here´s what we´ve learned. Here´s the
data.’ They embrace the answer.”
“WE’VE ALWAYS APPROACHED MARKETING IN THE CONTEXT OF WHAT’S THE BUSINESS GOAL? WHAT ARE THE PIPELINE GOALS? WHAT ARE THE CUSTOMER RETENTION GOALS? AND HOW CAN MARKETING HELP WITH THAT?”
BloomReach’s First Head of Marketing, Joelle Kaufman
When you are selling something that no one has ever sold,
you have to build your marketing strategy from the ground
up. It’s not so much that nobody wants what you’ve got; it’s
that few even know it exists.
“You have to think really differently,” says BloomReach’s first
head of marketing, Joelle Kaufman.
28
Think differently how? By educating the market; identifying
the right people and teams of people at the right companies;
leveraging technology to amplify your instincts and experience
and by building a content machine that is about more than
simply explaining and promoting products.
“What we came to, was the realization that we knew who were
going to be the most likely beneficiaries of our product. We
were able to target our market. Then we used a combination
of manpower and technology to identify the right people at the
right accounts in that market,” Kaufman says.
And BloomReach identified and cultivated advocates, customers
and other experts who understood the company’s technology
and the power of it.
“There were people who were already getting it,” Kaufman says.
“And if we could have them speak to the market, in a way that
wasn’t time-consuming, in a way that didn’t violate any of their
corporate policies, we could bring that understanding to a wider
audience, a targeted, wider audience.”
She remembered the 2012 party to
celebrate the company emerging from
stealth mode. Talk about mixing business
with pleasure.
“We videotaped at our launch event,
everybody who would talk to us and cut it
up and created our first video testimonials,”
Kaufman said.
Marketing at BloomReach has come a
long way since Kaufman arrived in 2011 at
a company with a five-page website and
a corporate logo that appears to inspire
revulsion to this day.
“It was awful,” she says. “It was this orange
and green flower thing. It was one of my
more enjoyable things when I said to the
board that it is going away.”
PLACEHOLDER
IMAGE
29
Flowers die, Kaufman went on to explain.
They require watering. Even with watering,
they sometimes droop. And did she mention
they die? Of course she did.
“What are we selling here? We’re selling
lettuce? Oranges? I don’t know what we’re
selling here,” she says. “It was not modern.
It was not crisp. It wasn’t what I will call a
good bug, for your browser, for anything you
have to brand.”
The flower was out and the beloved circle
b was in.
It might seem a little thing, but building
a new company is about doing a nearly
incalculable number of little things right.
And so it was with the addition of Hippo
to BloomReach. The two companies looked
for the best in each others’ marketing as
the company became one. BloomReach’s
account-based marketing approach was a good fit for some
Hippo accounts. For BloomReach, Hippo’s work on inbound
marketing opened up some new possibilities.
In marketing, there’s the education, the targeting, the content,
the logo, oh and, one more thing: There’s figuring out what sort
of relationship you’re going to build with customers. It’s one
thing to secure their cooperation in talking up your company, but
what’s in it for them?
BloomReach endeavors to forge a feeling among customers and
even would-be customers that they are collaborators with the
company, that BloomReach is a partner in helping customers
and advocates reach not only their business goals, but their
personal goals, too.
“Our customers want us to help them with their careers, with
their businesses,” Kaufman says, “so to the extent that we can,
we talk about what is happening with their businesses, with
their lives and then weave in how we work.”
It’s a start, or a foundation, if you will — a foundation on which
you can build a company.
30
It’s Friday morning and Customer Success Manager Sona
Parikh is on a call with a tough customer. They are using
both organic and the site search product for mobile. The
integration of site search for the desktop went poorly and
the customer ended up pulling the plug. Now Parikh is using
WebEx to show the executives how their traffic has been
trending. The desktop is flat to down slightly, she explains,
but if you add in mobile, traffic overall is up 7 percent.
“It shows changes in the user base,” someone on the
customer side of the call says.
They get it. Consumers are moving to mobile.
It’s one of the ways that customer success and technical
product team members demonstrate that they are partners
with customers. It helps to have the data to show the way,
but this is more than just a numbers game.
“ I T ’ S V E RY CO NSU LT I N G - L I K E . THEY’RE TALKING TO YOU ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS AND WHAT RULES YOU HAVE IN PLACE AND WHAT SUCCESS THEY HAVE. WHAT RULES D O Y O U J U D G E U S B Y ? ”
Head of Customer Success, Christy Augustine
31
Yes, there are times when BloomReach and its customers
disagree. It happens to every business and that inherent
conflict has produced all sorts of bromides: “The
customer is always right.” “We should be the Nordstrom
of…” fill in the blank.
But in the real world, the customer is not always right —
always the focus, but not always right. And, depending
on what type of business one is building, being the
Nordstrom of a given industry takes on different
meanings.
Christy Augustine, head of customer success, has a
pretty clear view of what BloomReach customers want
most from the company.
“WE ALL HAVE ROOM TO WORK ON LISTENING TO CUSTOMERS AND KIND OF GETTING AT WHAT THEY WANT IN A SIMPLER, LESS ARGUMENTATIVE WAY. IT’S A BALANCE. YOU WANT TO FOLLOW THE ANALYTICS. YOU WANT TO PUSH FOR WHAT YOU THINK IS RIGHT, BASED ON THE ANALYSIS, BUT YOU HAVE TO LISTEN. ULTIMATELY, YOU HAVE TO MEET THE CUSTOMER’S NEED.”
Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Will Uppington
32
“The thing they mostly rate us on, or care about, are our
products and our innovation,” she says. “If you want to
be disruptive, you, unfortunately, can’t always say yes.”
And so, yes, disagreements arise. Augustine sorts these
disagreements into two categories:
When one of BloomReach’s products is
somehow not doing what it is supposed to do.
When a customer feels like BloomReach is not
delivering the value that it said it would.
“Sometimes when the customer is upset or asking for
something, often it has to do with the product being
incomplete,” she says. “We’re selling very early products.
When we think we have a gap in those, we almost
universally act like the customer is right and we should
do exactly what they said.”
And in the other cases? The cases in which there are
complaints that an integration is taking too long or there
is a dispute on the value that BloomReach brings to a
business? In those cases, it’s time to turn to the data
and the belief that data wins arguments.
“The downside of being so data-driven, frankly, is that
you can lose sight of two things,” Augustine says. “You
can lose sight of the big picture. And you can lose the
soft side of it: How do I approach someone who is
mad at me?”
In the end, working through the disagreements often
takes as much art as science.
But when delivered in the right way, the right data has
the power to win a customer over by helping them see
that the value is in fact there. It starts with plenty of
communication.
Hackathons have become hackneyed. Who doesn’t
have them? If you’re a Silicon Valley tech company, no
hackathon equals no street cred. You might as well toss
out the Red Bull and Soylent in the corporate kitchen, as
pull the plug on hackathons.
That’s not to say there aren’t ways to shake things up
a little. When BloomReach held its first Hackathon in
2012, it provided its own twist: It invited a customer to
join in the engineering marathon. Not just any customer
— Neiman Marcus, one of its biggest and best-known
customers at the time.
33
The invitation grew out of a need. Like nearly every retailer in 2012, Neiman was wrestling
with the challenge of how to increase sales on mobile devices. Mobile traffic was growing
and mobile as a lifestyle was accelerating impressively. But sales were not showing the
same growth.
Neiman was a happy Organic Search customer and they argued that given BloomReach’s
track record, mobile was something the company should be able to solve.
Mobile was not exactly a company priority at the time, but Neiman was not taking “no”
for an answer. With Neiman’s retail expertise and BloomReach’s deep understanding of
search and discovery, why not solve it together, Neiman suggested to CEO Raj De Datta.
“So, I think Raj finally told them, ‘If you’re serious, send a team out and we’ll brainstorm,’”
says Christy Augustine, head of customer success, who was charged with running the
hackathon.
It’s crazy, really, to invite an outsider — a customer no less — in to see how you go about
your business, particularly when you’re headed for uncharted waters. Every setback, slip-
up, piece of bad code would be on full display during the joint hackathon.
“HE PULLED ME IN A ROOM, ASKED ME TO RUN IT. NOW, HE ASKED, BUT WHEN THE CEO ASKS YOU TO DO A PROJECT LIKE THAT, THERE IS ONLY ONE ANSWER. AND LITERALLY, WE WERE GETTING UP TO LEAVE, AND HE SAYS, ‘SO, DON’T GET ME FIRED.’”
Head of Customer Success, Christy Augustine
Describing the day Raj De Datta asked her to organize a hackathon
with customer Neiman Marcus.
34
“We thought there was big risk,” Augustine says.
“When you do a hackathon like that, you’re pulling
back the covers of your company to one of your most
important customers. You’re putting them in a room with
everyone, raw.”
For two days, the teams worked together, sketching out
and designing a mobile search product that eventually
would power mobile search in a new way by adding
features and removing barriers that had frustrated
customers navigating tiny screens.
Within months, the work became BloomReach
Mobile, which evolved into BloomReach SNAP, which
evolved into BloomReach Commerce Search and
BloomReach Commerce Categories. But whatever you
call it, it evolved into the company’s second major
product and and a key pillar in the BloomRech Digital
Experience Platform.
“WE ARE ALL OWNERS IN THIS COMPANY – AND WE WILL BEHAVE LIKE WE ARE. WE WILL SPEND LIKE IT’S OUR OWN MONEY.”
BloomReach Values
“The Neiman hackathon, coupled with launching Bloom
Mobile and seeing where SNAP is now, is probably the
coolest, greatest thing I’ve done in my career,” Augustine
says. “It’s not just that we have this commerce product
that is performing well and is a great addition to the
company. But the people I got to work with are some of
the smartest, best people that I’ve ever gotten to work
with. That’s like your dream.”
35
After months of commuting to Palo Alto from Berkeley
in the early days, engineer Joshua Levy decided it
was time to move to the Peninsula. His move, in fact,
was coming at the same time that BloomReach was
moving from Plug and Play to its Castro Street office
in Mountain View.
Levy says he rented a U-Haul to move his stuff to his
new place in Mountain View. As he picks up the story:
“And Raj, in what I later realized was his typical style, is
like, ‘Oh, if you happen to have that U-Haul, can we use
it to bring some things to the office?’ Because he had a
couch and a couple of things he wanted to get to
the office.”
This was a CEO who, when BloomReach needed its
first conference room telephone, found a used one on
Craigslist and closed the deal under a freeway overpass
in some sort of scene out of Spy vs. Spy.
Levy had already caught on that BloomReach wasn’t
anything like the start-up he left to join the company.
In fact, he had been at one of those start-ups that
tickles the Silicon Valley buzz machine and leads to big
investments and even bigger burn rates.
“We were spending millions on servers and getting food
catered in,” Levy says of his former start-up.
BloomReach, of course, provides lunch for its employees,
too. But rather than buying lunch every day, the
company pays for lunch in Mountain View on Mondays,
Wednesdays and Fridays. Sure, that saves two-fifths of
the lunch budget, but it also makes a statement. It says
the company is thoughtful about spending. And it says
that maybe having lunch at the office every day isn’t the
healthiest way to exist.
Why not get out and live a little?
36
Committed. Outspoken. Smart. Together.
Humorous.
They are the words that Hippo has lived by. Its
culture in words.
“We used the values to describe the company,
more than as a wish list for people to have
those values,” says Linda Neijenhuis, Hippo’s
Chief of Staff. “My experience here is that we
have a very strong culture. It was always very
important — always.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Hippo culture was
informed by the company’s dedication to open-
source architecture. Open source is a form that
requires that people put themselves out there;
that work and ideas are held up, examined and
commented upon.
“The population that we have is very outspoken
and also very committed and you see that very
much in the open-source culture,” Neijenhuis
says. “People are intrinsically interested in
technology, so they build upon the platforms
that exist. And they share it with the world, so
they want to become better as a collective. It’s
not about individuals or ego.”
Such an open and outspoken culture is not
without its risks. Opinions and observations
offered in haste can sting. But Hippo culture
brings the antidote with it.
37
“One of our values is humor,” Neijenhuis says. “I don’t
think the value of humor is used a lot in corporate, but to
us it’s very important because it means we do make fun
of ourselves and we don’t take ourselves too seriously.
And you can balance conversations with it.”
She says she saw how the BloomReach and Hippo
cultures would mesh during the first big meeting of
the two executive teams — two days of getting to
know each other, setting priorities, planning strategies
and the like.
“It felt very at ease, immediately,” Neijenhuis says. “You
have 20 people in a room, with very strong personalities,
all very smart. People spoke up, but there were no
clashes and everything was very open. It was very
natural. It just felt right.”
Exhibit one, in Neijenhuis’ mind, was the way that
BloomReach executives quickly adopted Hippo’s
One Page Strategic Plan process for charting and
assessing progress.
“It’s a great example of picking the best options from each
other,” she says. “Everyone here is really looking forward
to reaching out to their counterpart at BloomReach to
see how they are doing things. And if they are doing it
better, they’ll switch to that immediately.”
“I’VE WORKED AT A LOT OF VERY BIG COMPANIES BEFORE. THEIR CULTURE WAS ALWAYS WRITTEN ON THE WALLS AND IT WAS EMAILED. IT WAS EVERYWHERE. BUT I DON’T THINK IT WAS LIVED MUCH.”
Chief of Staff, Linda Neijenhuis
38
“TWO MONTHS AFTER I JOINED BLOOMREACH, MY MOTHER DIED. WORDS OF COMFORT AND CONCERN FLOWED FROM ALL CORNERS. THE MESSAGE WAS CLEAR: TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF; TAKE TIME; GO; GRIEVE. MY COLLEAGUES DIDN’T JUST COMFORT ME. THEY DID MY WORK. AND WHEN THE CRYING AND HUGGING WAS OVER; WHEN THE FUNERAL WAS FINISHED, I WALKED BACK INTO 82 PIONEER WAY AND I KNEW I WAS HOME.”
Storyteller, Mike Cassidy
39
When Product Analyst Ashley Vetter learned that
her illness would keep her away from BloomReach
for an extended period (think months), those closest
to her at work wanted to make sure she knew
that her colleagues were thinking of her. She was
headed across the country to receive a bone marrow
transplant and to have some of the best medical
sleuths in the world try to figure out what was
causing her blood cells to mutate.
“We love Ashley. Ashley is awesome,” says People
Program Manager Brian Bell. “And knowing that she
was leaving, Claudia and I were like, OK, let’s just
send her a to-go package. Something to let her know
we care.”
And so they sent a care package, but that wasn’t
enough. It needed to be a recurring thing.
“We wanted to make sure that she knows that
she is still a BloomReacher,” Bell says, “that we are
still thinking about her. And it’s not just, ‘Let’s pull
something out from Amazon and ship it.’”
And in talking about what to send next, Product
Analyst Claudia Lee thought, why not a video
message? But not just any video message — a
singing video message, a karaoke message consisting
of Vetter’s favorite song, Mariah Carey’s “Always Be
My Baby.”
“So the next day, we set up a camera and said, ‘Hey,
if you want to send a message out to Ashley, this is
what we’re doing.’”
Bell says he and Lee figured they’d wait to see what
they’d get.
“And we got a huge turnout and a ton of people who
wanted to do it,” he says. “Some people we might
have coerced. We didn’t tell them exactly what we
were doing. But as soon as we said it was for Ashley,
and that this was her favorite song, everybody did
it.”
The effect that a karaoke video has on everyone
who has a connection to it, isn’t the sort of thing
that shows up in quarterly reports tracking ongoing
innovation or ROI. But the return on such a personal
investment is undeniable.
The video’s arrival was particularly well timed.
The day Vetter received it was a bad day, a day
when discouragement was winning the battle over
optimism. As Vetter prepared for a meeting with her
doctors, she noticed she had an email from Bell and
Lee.
“It was the video,” she says. “I sat on the edge
of my bed while watching. I was laughing and
crying. But most importantly, a burst of energy
came over me. I was filled with thankfulness and
love and it was exactly what I needed to get
through the day.”
40
BloomReach’s foundation started with the very first hires
— hires that took a long time to find.
“We actually spent a number of months interviewing
people and we just kept rejecting people,” says CEO
Raj De Datta. “So here we were, two people, in a Plug
and Play office in Palo Alto, interviewing people, with no
employees — and continually rejecting people because
they didn’t meet our standard. It’s pretty interesting to
keep showing up at board meetings and saying, ‘We’re
still interviewing. We haven’t really done anything with
your $5 million just yet.”
Eventually, of course, De Datta and co-founder Ashutosh
Garg found candidates who met their standards. And
when they did, it was time for a full-court press. engineer
Joshua Levy, who was the second employee hired, says
De Datta’s persistence was one reason he believed
BloomReach was going places.
“I really liked that he was determined,” Levy says. “He
emailed and called me and tried to meet with me every
“DON’T COME IN THINKING, ‘I WANT TO GET THIS TITLE. I WANT TO GET TO THIS POSITION. I WANT TO MANAGE THIS NUMBER OF PEOPLE.’ COME IN AND SAY, ‘THE BEST THING FOR ME IS IF BLOOMREACH IS A SUPER SUCCESSFUL COMPANY.”
Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Will Uppington
41
day, until I finally caved in and said yes.”
BloomReach is a place where you hit the ground running
— hit it running and be ready to pivot quickly and run
in a different direction. It is a place that attracts 10x
performers and a place where every move you make,
makes a difference — for better or worse.
“In retrospect, we looked back and the first people we
absorbed into the company set the standard for the
quality of every one we would bring in thereafter,” De
Datta says.
It turns out the hiring process is as deliberative as it is
determined. Garg says that he might give a candidate
the benefit of the doubt on any misgivings he has about
the candidate’s technical skills, as long as others on the
affected team are comfortable with his or her skill level.
Yes, hiring is about finding people with smarts. The
company boasts a deep bench of Ph.Ds and alumni from
the best tech companies in the world. But it’s about a lot
more than that. There is a BloomReach ethic and culture,
a way of doing things and treating each other.
“If I don’t feel strongly about the cultural fit, then it’s a
showstopper,” says Garg.
In fact, it’s a showstopper if any one person on the
interviewing team believes the candidate won’t fit
BloomReach’s culture.
“Everyone,” Garg says, “has the veto power to say no.”
IN THE 10XERS
42
Ask any entrepreneur, and if they are being honest, they’ll tell
you there are days, moments certainly, when they wonder
why they ever started a business in the first place. And then
there are the days they know why — without question.
Days like the one in January 2016, when BloomReach
shattered conventional wisdom by securing a hefty round of
funding in a tough market. It was the company’s fourth and
biggest round of funding — $56 million, which represented
a doubling down by early investors and a vote of confidence
from some new backers.
“I’VE NEVER EASILY ACCEPTED THAT FAILURE OF ANY KIND WAS EVEN A POSSIBILITY. AND THE ONE THING I KNOW FOR SURE IS THERE IS REALLY ONLY ONE WAY TO FAIL, WHICH IS, YOU RUN OUT OF MONEY. OR MAYBE YOU RUN OUT OF ENERGY. I ’M CERTAINLY NOT OUT OF ENERGY.”
CEO, Raj De Datta
43
The money was nice, but sitting in a conference room
as the public announcement was imminent, CEO Raj De
Datta, said there was much more to it than money. The
investment, which brought the company’s total to $97
million, was also a stamp of approval of BloomReach’s
take on the cloud-based marketing technology field.
“We believe there is a $10-billion company to be
created in this space,” he says “We think this funding
is a validation that investors of various stripes and of
extraordinary levels of experience have concluded
that, A, indeed there is such an opportunity and,
B, that BloomReach is a promising candidate for
such an opportunity.”
The size of investors’ bet on BloomReach was an early
indication of the evolution of the fledgling marketing
technology field, which has grown geometrically in
its early years. As many as 2,000 companies provide
thousands of technology tools promising to help
marketers discover, engage, measure, automate
and optimize — all to better find the right customer
at the right time and encourage them to engage
with their enterprises.
While the forest fire analogy is sometimes overused, it
seemed apt in the world of marketing technology circa
2016. While traumatic and damaging, the fire takes out
old overgrowth and leaves behind the strong and room
for new growth.
“What this funding means,” De Datta said in that
conference room. “Is that the space will go from the
purview of small, innovative startups that have a
point solution, to the emergence of a small number of
independent, next-generation platform players.”
44
The $56 million certainly was a turning point.
BloomReach had been a company, like many early stage
startups, that was willing to forego profits in the interest
of growth. The approach had abruptly fallen out of favor
in early 2016 and BloomReach was reaching a maturity
that called for a more profit-centered approach.
Growth would continue, but it would be balanced with
the goal of profitability.
In the world of business — and starting and growing
them — invested money isn’t just money. It’s a sign
that you’re on the right track; a sign that those who
make steely eyed decisions with their fortunes, and the
fortunes of others, believe that you have what it takes to
make their money back and more.
“I feel like it’s a great privilege that these amazing
investors would entrust us with their money — and
that we should treat it with the honor that it deserves
in terms of how we use it to create value,” De Datta
says. “In some ways it’s a validation of what we’ve
done, but more importantly, it’s a prognosticator of
what’s to come.”
45
“IT COMES DOWN TO THAT THERE IS A VERY SMALL SET OF PEOPLE IN THE COMPANY TRYING TO SERVE A SUPER LARGE COMMUNITY OF CUSTOMERS. THAT’S A PROBLEM MACHINES CAN SOLVE FOR YOU.”
Hippo Co-founder, Jeroen Verberg
The team at Hippo could see what everybody could
see: The digital economy was changing with remarkable
speed. Consumers were demanding more — better
digital experiences in particular — and because they
were demanding more, Hippo’s customers had to find a
way to give them more.
“The real problem for the people working with our
products, has been really knowing what to do next,”
Hippo co-founder Jeroen Verberg says.
Hippo had provided powerful tools to build content-rich
digital sites and to manage that content over multiple
devices. They included the capability to serve up the
right content to consumers through tagging and other
manual techniques.
Hippo wanted more and the world was demanding it.
“We looked at ways for how can we really transform
the tool from a tool that you use for building your site
or managing content to one that provides insight,”
Verberg said.
The math was beginning to move in the wrong direction
for Hippo. They had a relatively small group of people
working to help customers compete for a very large
audience. Only so much is humanly possible.
Hippo CMO Tjeerd Brenninkmeijer explains it this way:
Hippo started out as a system that essentially allowed
users to type and their content would publish online.
Right off, Hippo created a system that separated the
content itself from the way it was delivered, “which was
pretty visionary, because the iPhone didn’t exist yet.”
Still the team knew that content ultimately would be
used across many channels. And they knew the way
content was managed needed to be more sophisticated.
“We knew that the next challenge would be, if it’s that
easy to create a lot of content, how do you present
the right content at the right moment in the context
of the user?”
So, they created a personalization engine that, with
some rules and manual tuning, allows enterprises to
present more personalized content online.
“What we noticed is, there is more and more manual
labor needed to look at the data, define the personas,
create those rules, experiment with it, monitor whether
46
that content worked for that persona, look at the data
again,” Brenninkmeijer says. “It doesn’t scale — too
many editors, data analysts, webmasters are needed to
create a customer journey.”
At the same time, machine learning and artificial
intelligence were taking off, he says. “So we were looking
at, how can we buy, or can we build, something in regard
to what we see as the next generation of CMS or DX.”
As luck, fate or the exigencies of the market would have
it, BloomReach, a company with plenty of machines,
came calling.
“He reached out and we had a call over the phone,”
Verberg says of his counterpart, BloomReach co-founder
Raj De Datta. “Raj introduced BloomReach to me. For me
it was basically the idea of merging the technology into
a company and the vision into something new, which
was an interesting idea.”
The call led to dinner. The dinner led to a trip to Mountain
View for Verberg and team. And the trip to Mountain
View led to a feeling that joining forces was the
right thing to do.
“We said let’s spend $5,000 on tickets just to learn
something. We flew in and then, when we met the
people over in Mountain View, and kind of sensed the
atmosphere, although hectic, what came through for me
was this notion that BloomReach is a real company.”
Ultimately, Verberg says, it’s about the people and the
people he met were mindful and curious and the right
partners for the company he started in Amsterdam 17
years earlier.
47
BYE?
“OVER TIME, I THINK THE MAIN INFLUENCE WAS PROBABLY AROUND A FEW THINGS: THE ENGINEERING CULTURE, DEFINITELY A DATA-DRIVEN-DECISION-MAKING CULTURE. THERE WERE A LOT OF INTERESTING THINGS THAT I THOUGHT WOULD BE GOOD WHEN I STARTED MY OWN THING.”
Technical Staff Member, Viksit Gaur, 2010 - 2015
Every work experience leaves a mark. The best places
avoid leaving scars and instead build on the past in
preparation for the future. Sri Sridhar, a member of
BloomReach’s founding team, was at Facebook in 2009,
when he heard about the company, which was still in
stealth mode. He was into search and algorithms and
building new things. So was BloomReach. And so Sridhar
left what was already one of the world’s best known
companies for one no one had heard of.
“One of the things that Ashutosh told me was you
don’t join a company,” he says, referring to co-founder
Ashutosh Garg. “You join a team.”
It is the way of Silicon Valley, a tech center that is
something of a small town. Brilliant engineers and
accomplished business people constantly circulate and
spin in and out of each other’s lives and companies.
Sridhar, who helped build the technological foundation
for everything that was to come later at BloomReach,
left the company in 2013, to start his own enterprise. But
maybe “left” isn’t the word.
He talks regularly with former colleagues. BloomReach
co-founders Raj De Datta and Garg are investors in his
company, Onera.
“I’m still in touch with Ashutosh. I still ask him
similar questions that I was asking when I was with
BloomReach,” Sridhar says. “If I’m running a company,
building a product, selling something, engineering
something, from a day-to-day standpoint, it’s extremely
important that I can actually pick up the phone and call
NOT YET
48
Ashutosh and be like, ‘I’m trying to build a thing and
here are the things that are failing, what do you think
about it?”
And De Datta? He’s the call for questions like, “‘I’m
raising this round, here are the issues I’m running into.
What do you think?’ Or you have a challenging customer.
They don’t understand our technology. I’ve tried writing
white papers to explain it to them, but they still don’t
get it. I’ve tried explaining it to them from a marketing
angle and they still don’t get it. What do I do?”
A company can be a place where you work, but a better
company is a place where you learn. BloomReach is like
a pebble in a pond, making a splash that radiates out in
the form of other new companies launched by alumni of
what could be called BloomReach University.
“Obviously, there are both positives and negatives,
in terms of, as the organization grows, you see how
something works or how something doesn’t,” says Viksit
Gaur, who worked on BloomReach’s technical staff for
more than four years before leaving to launch Myra Labs.
“Overall, seeing the kind of people who were there at
that time, it was a really insightful look into the valley
and how a startup grows from seven people to the 250-
ish (and beyond) that we are now.”
Ittai Barzilay, who moved to startup InfoScout after
nearly four years at BloomReach agrees.
“I’ve had a 360-degree view of what it’s like to build
something, launch something, sell something from
every possible role,” says Barzilay, who worked with the
people, product management, sales and engineering
teams at BloomReach. “So no matter who I’m talking
to — if it’s an engineer, a sales rep, the finance guy —
I know what they’re thinking and I know how to speak
their language.”
They are lessons you don’t forget. But more than that,
they are taught by people you’ll always remember.
Or as Sridhar, who keeps in touch with former
colleagues, puts it:
“I’m still part of BloomReach.”
PLACEHOLDER
IMAGE
49
Before you sell your company, you do all sorts of due
diligence. Financial due diligence, technological due
diligence, legal due diligence. What is not standard is
emotional due diligence and so on the emotional side of
the ledger, the Hippo team encountered some surprises.
“The day of the announcement, it certainly was not
euphoria,” Hippo co-founder Jeroen Verberg says.
“It was much more of an emotional day and it was,
in a way, sad.”
“Bittersweet” might be a better term.
Think about it: Verberg started the company with two
others, who were partners and friends. For 17 years, with
the help of a growing team, they pushed the company
forward; suffered its setbacks and cheered its victories.
They would remain together at BloomReach, working
on what Hippo started, but Hippo, as they knew it,
was going away.
“People are very emotional about this whole process,”
Chief of Staff Linda Neijenhuis says. “But they are
also very ambitious and want to move on and do it as
quickly as we can.”
And that’s just it. BloomReach’s purchase of Hippo
catapulted both into the next chapter of the
digital economy.
“The way I thought about it was, at some point you
“I WAS ACTUALLY SURPRISED THAT AT SOME POINT IN THIS JOURNEY, IT STARTED TO BECOME SOMETHING TO BE A HIPPOER. I NEVER REALIZED IT WAS A THING, BUT NOW IT’S A THING. THIS IS WHO WE ARE. SO, IT’S ACTUALLY BIGGER THAN I THOUGHT. IT’S NICE TO SEE THAT.”
50
Companies are like families and countries and tribes.
They are like neighborhoods and schools and sports
teams. They have a language, a culture, a history, a
way of doing things. And like a country, each wave of
newcomers adds something new to the rich stew.
BloomReach has its regular happy hours, annual holiday
party, October Halloween party, Diwali celebration and
raucous Holi festival. Some BloomReachers run from
Napa to Santa Cruz; others play Mafia or smoke cigars
and drink Scotch in the dwindling Friday twilight bathing
the picnic tables outside. There are healthier pursuits,
too, such as the revolving exercise classes that take
place most nights in the Wreck Room in Mountain View.
That started with Senior Contract Negotiator Cindy
Relick, who was a driving force behind starting a fitness
program at Palo Alto Networks before she arrived at
BloomReach.
need to be able to let things go,” Verberg says. “If you’re
afraid to let things go, then you’re not going to succeed.
Instead of building stuff and growing, you’re holding
on. I really believe in the vision of combining artificial
intelligence/machine learning with content as the next
big thing.”
And it’s not as if selling the company negates Hippo’s
story or past, Brenninkmeijer says. Verberg, Arjé Cahn
and he are still co-founders. And their company’s
prospects look better than ever.
“When something changes, you can look at the fear of it,
or the interesting aspect,” he says. “And the interesting
aspect, for ambitious people, is more appealing — and
also for the entrepreneurs in us.”
51
“WHEN PEOPLE BRING THEIR KIDS INTO THE OFFICE OR THEIR FAMILIES OR DOGS, PEOPLE STOP TO PLAY WITH THEM, TALK TO THEM. IT’S NOT A BIG DEAL THAT THERE ARE KIDS RUNNING AROUND OR PLAYING ON THE TABLE WITH LEGOS OR CLIMBING ON THE SOFAS.”
Recruiter, Dayna Wu
“When I came here, I really missed that,” she says. “And
I knew that Raj was a big tennis buff; and there were
so many young people here who liked fitness and they
would talk about the different places that they went to.
And they also talked about the struggle to get to their
gyms at a reasonable hour.”
So, Cindy brought the gym to them — four evenings a
week. It’s hard to keep up, both in class and with the
classes available — circuit training, yoga, pilates, barre,
POUND, not to mention the occasional sprint through
the parking lot.
Beyond the literal muscles, there are figurative
muscles to be flexed at BloomReach, too. How do you
remain socially nimble in an enterprise that is formed
around teams with ambitious and specific goals? Like
neighborhoods, sometimes a workplace can self-select,
engineers hanging with engineers, marketers with
marketers, finance people with finance people. Idea-
generation can stagnate. Myopia can develop.
52
52
So, what to do?
“The problem is people don’t communicate outside their
comfort zones,” says Principal Engineer Max Zanko.
Lunch seemed like a good place to start, first with Lunch
Lotto. Create lunchtime foursomes through a random
drawing and send them off to eat together on the spot.
Later came the Lunch Club, a less frenetic, computerized
pairing of co-workers who make a lunch date.
“You put your name and your team into the doc and then
there is like a very simple program that takes this list
and tries to match people from different teams, says
Zanko, who oversees the program. “And then, once a
month, you just go.”
A company takes on a personality of its own. Or at
least it seems to. Companies are cutthroat or arrogant,
friendly or earnest. Companies can appear brilliant
or maddening. So what about BloomReach? Say
BloomReach were a person you were inviting to a dinner
party. How would you describe BloomReach to the other
guests who’d be attending?
“BloomReach is super smart,” says Head of Customer
“IT’S A FUN ATMOSPHERE. I LOVE WHEN IT’S NOISY, WHICH IS GREAT BECAUSE I SIT NEAR THE PING PONG TABLE. I CAN’T WORK IN QUIET. I LOVE HEARING IDEAS EXCHANGED AND DEBATED. I LOVE HEARING DIFFERENT LANGUAGES SPOKEN.”
Taxonomist, Season Hughes
AT LE ASTB LOO M RE ACHIS N OT YOURCR A Z Y UN CLE
53
Success Christy Augustine. “You better back up everything
you say with data. If you need them to do anything, they
will totally do it. If you need this person to help you move,
they’ll help you move. But they argue a lot. They’ll be pretty
opinionated. And they’d be super cute.”
“I think BloomReach is somebody who is very curious, who
asks a lot of questions at the dinner table,” says Raj De Datta.
“It has a point of view. If asked, it doesn’t shrink back in their
seats and say, ‘I don’t have an opinion on that.’ They would
want to make sure that the people at that table, that the
relationship with them was genuine; that it wasn’t contrived
in anyway. It probably would be somebody who would want to
make sure that they left that dinner having gotten something
out of it and having contributed something to it.”
“I would say BloomReach is ambitious, creative, learning,”
Chief Technology Officer Amit Aggarwal says. “It’s growing
up and learning to grow up, maybe. It’s not focused enough.
We’re figuring out what it means to be a big company and
part of that is doing many things and finding your place.”
54
1+1=
“THEN WE LOOKED AT IT AND IT WAS ONE PLUS ONE EQUALS THREE, OR FIVE. FOR SURE, MORE THAN TWO.”
Hippo Co-founder, Jeroen Verberg
55
As 2016 turned to 2017, it was apparent that
both BloomReach and Hippo were headed for
greater things.
From that 2008 conversation between two
ambitious entrepreneurs at the Neto Caffè
BloomReach had grown into a marketing
technology powerhouse, consistently winning
awards as a great place to work, but also being
recognized for its technology.
Meanwhile, with the Waag days in the distant
past, Hippo’s open-source, Java-based, cloud-
powered answers for content challenges, and
its DX in particular, were gaining increasing
notice from a tough crowd: analysts from blue
chip outfits like Forrester and Gartner.
The team’s technology moved quickly from
a “niche player” to a “visionary” in Gartner’s
Magic Quadrant. Hippo onDemand debuted in
Forrester’s Wave as a “strong performer.”
“Our rating as a Strong Performer in the 2017
Forrester Wave is a reflection of our growth,
innovation and commitment to providing a
platform that continually drives success for our
customers ,” Hippo co-founder Jeroen Verberg
told reporters at the time.
It was a time for celebration. And then a time to
get back to work.
“As we continue to integrate with BloomReach,”
Verberg added, “we look forward to a
monumental year for our combined platform.”
PLACEHOLDER
IMAGE
56
?
It’s a stuffy afternoon in the Dinosaurs conference room.
Engineer Chou-han Yang is at the whiteboard working
through a problem with a recently hired engineer, who is
struggling with a piece of code.
“I can see the code,” Yang says, as he writes on the
whiteboard. “You can write code like you can write a
poem. This way you can see the beauty of the code.” It’s
not the way Yang saw his life when he was younger. He
was going to be an artist, a musician, maybe. He was
going to study languages. He was accepted by Blaise
Pascal University. He was going to live in Paris.
ENDEAVORED TO BUILD A PLACE THAT WOULD O F F E R T H E M O S T MEANINGFUL STOP ON ONE’S CAREER PATH?
57
And then Stanford University called.
“My mom said, ‘No. No. You’ve got to go to Stanford.’ Life
is all about choices. If I made the choice to go to France,
I’d probably live in Paris. I’d probably be an artist now.”
Instead, he went to Stanford. And he found a different
creative outlet. “I just feel programming is art,” he says.
“The art of programming.”
After a stint at VMware, his greatest creation was
at BloomReach: a site fetch system that has run
continuously for years. “If you look at that code, every
single line of it. I gave my best to every single line of it,”
Yang says. I don’t have any reservations. I think this is
probably the best system, the best crawling and data-
processing system, that I can imagine.”
BloomReach, it seems, brings out the best in people.
“If you’re looking for a company full of smart people,
you’re spoiled with choices out here,” former Recruiting
Coordinator Alyssa Clang says of Silicon Valley.
“BloomReach is one of those companies, but it’s more
than that, too. It’s a family, an all-star sports team
and the best college class you’ve ever taken, all rolled
into one. By nurturing a culture of growth, acceptance,
speed and transparency, we’re all becoming better
here — better workers, better communicators, better
innovators, and better friends — every single day.”
From the code to the products to the marketing and
sales approach, to the way we work with customers;
from the way we balance the books and balance work
“I FEEL LIKE I’VE WORKED MY WHOLE CAREER FOR THIS OPPORTUNITY AT BLOOMREACH. THE CHANCE TO WORK WITH TWO OF THE MOST HUMANE (AND DEMANDING) LEADERS, WHO WANT TO CREATE NOT ONLY A HUGELY SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS, BUT ALSO A COMPANY WHERE PEOPLE CAN HAVE A PROFOUND PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE, IS SOMETHING A LOT OF PEOPLE SAY THEY’RE OFFERING, BUT AT BLOOMREACH, WE’RE REALLY OFFERING IT.”
Head of People, Sondra Norris
with fun and career with family, BloomReach strives
for excellence and reaches it — not every time, but
much of the time.
“We have so many good people,” Hippo Chief of Staff
Linda Neijenhuis says. “How can we use all the talent
we have and actually conquer the world? Because
I think we can.”
It is those talented people and the way they care for
each other that infuse BloomReach with a sense of
strength; a strength that brings with it great promise
and an embrace of the future — a future that is
right there in front of us all, as it was on Day Zero
and every day after.
58
BloomReachers are thinkers. Sure, they think
about their work, as in a list of priorities and
accomplishments, but they also think about work
in another way. As important as what gets done
at BloomReach, is how it gets done; how we treat
each other and customers and partners.
That’s something BloomReachers think a lot
about, too. What follows are some of the
thoughts from some of those who have made
BloomReach what it is.
“IN RETROSPECT, WE LOOKED BACK AND THE FIRST PEOPLE WE ABSORBED INTO THE COMPANY SET THE STANDARD FOR THE QUALITY OF EVERY ONE WE WOULD BRING IN THEREAFTER.”
Raj De Datta , CEO
“INNOVATION AT BLOOMREACH IS ABOUT CONSTANT ITERATION AND IMPROVEMENT. IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO COME UP WITH A GOOD IDEA. INNOVATION AT BLOOMREACH IS ABOUT CONSTANTLY THINKING A B O U T H O W T O I M P R O V E OUR PRODUCTS, ENHANCE CLIENT EXPERIENCE, AND STRENGTHEN OUR COMMUNITY. WE DON’T DO COMPLACENCY.”
Customer Success, Stella Treas
59
“EVERY OTHER PLACE I’VE BEEN TO HAS THE VALUES POSTED IN THE LOBBY OR LISTED ON THE WEB SITE OR WE’LL SEND IT TO YOU IN YOUR OFFER PACKAGE. BUT YOU NEVER READ IT. WHO GIVES A SHIT? YOU’RE WITH A SOFTWARE COMPANY TRYING TO SELL SHIT: BIGGER AND FASTER AND HIGHER MARGINS. BUT I ’LL TELL YOU, AT BLOOMREACH, IT ISN’T BULLSHIT. IT IS REAL. AND IT’S NOT JUST REAL THAT PEOPLE TALK ABOUT IT OR REALLY CARE ABOUT IT OR GIVE WORDS ABOUT IT. EVERYTHING WE DO IS ABOUT IT. IT ’S NOT BULLSHIT. AND I FIND IT MANIFESTED IN A FUNNY WAY. WE HAVE THESE ALL-HANDS MEETINGS. OH MY GOD. THEY TAKE FOREVER, RIGHT? THERE ARE TOO MANY OF THEM. EVERYBODY STARTS COMPLAINING ABOUT THEM. I GUESS THE WAY I LOOK AT IT: IT ’S LIKE DEMOCRACY. IF YOU WANT IT, YOU’VE GOT TO
DEAL WITH THE BULLSHIT THAT COMES WITH IT.”
Sales, DJ
“WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER AS OWNERS OF THE COMPANY. THE EXECUTIVES BELIEVE THAT THE SUCCESS OF THE COMPANY AND EACH AND EVERY SHAREHOLDER DEPENDS ON THE HARD WORK COMING FROM EVERY EMPLOYEE. SO SHARING THE GOOD, BAD AND UGLY KEEPS EVERYONE FOCUSED ON THE TASK AT HAND.”
Marketing, Justin Fogarty
“WE ARE GENUINE ALL AROUND. WE WON’T HIDE FRUSTRATION WHEN SOMETHING GOES WRONG, NOR GIVE PRAISE WHERE IT IS NOT MERITED. AT THE END OF THE DAY, WE BUILD AN ORGANIZATION, IN WHICH TRUST IS ABUNDANT AND REPLENISHED WITH EACH GENUINE INTERACTION WE HAVE. THERE’S NO BETTER WAY TO LOVE EACH OTHER.”
Product Management, Omar Fernandez
60
“ I WO R K AT B LO O M R E AC H BECAUSE OF THE PEOPLE I AM SURROUNDED BY. YES, IT IS IMPORTANT TO HAVE RELEVANT AND SUCCESSFUL PRODUCTS, BUT THAT WOULD MEAN DIDDLY-SQUAT IF THERE WASN’T A GREAT GROUP OF PEOPLE TO BUILD, GROW, AND NURTURE THE PRODUCTS. I WORK WITH AN INTELLIGENT GROUP THAT PUSHES ME TO WORK BETTER, SMARTER AND MORE EFFICIENTLY. THIS IS A GREAT TEAM AND I AM PROUD TO BE A PART OF IT.”
Product Analyst, Claudia Lee
“WE SHOW LOVE AT BLOOMREACH BY CELEBRATING INDIVIDUALITY. AN ENGINEER ON MY TEAM CREATED A TOOL TO HELP WITH TAXONOMY. HE ADDED LOTS OF HOT PINK AND SOME CAT ANIMATIONS JUST FOR ME. I ALWAYS FEEL APPRECIATED FOR BEING EXACTLY WHO I AM. WE ALSO ALL REALLY ENJOY TRASH-TALKING EACH OTHER AT PING PONG. TRUE LOVE.”
Taxonomist, Season Hughes
61
“I CANNOT KEEP UP WITH OUR OWN INNOVATION AT BLOOMREACH. I FEEL LIKE I AM CONSTANTLY FORCED TO LEARN NEW THINGS HERE, WHICH IS A HUMBLING AND THRILLING FEELING AT THE SAME TIME. I WORK AT BLOOMREACH NOT JUST BECAUSE IT’S INNOVATIVE, BUT BECAUSE I AM GIVEN THE FREEDOM TO INNOVATE MYSELF. THAT DOESN’T MEAN I CAN SPEND ALL DAY GOING ALL OVER THE CHARTS (WE BELIEVE THE BEST INNOVATION COMES FROM EXECUTION), BUT IT MEANS THAT PEOPLE WELCOME NEW WAYS OF DOING THINGS AND ARE OPEN TO FAILING HERE AND THERE. MORE THAN ANY OTHER EMPLOYER I’VE SEEN, BLOOMREACH RECOGNIZES AND REWARDS THOSE WHO STEP OUTSIDE THE BOX AND ARE WILLING TO TAKE RISKS, CONTRIBUTE TO THE CULTURE. THAT MAKES FOR AN ENVIRONMENT THAT I’M NOT SURE I’LL EVER FIND AGAIN IN MY PROFESSIONAL CAREER.”
Sales, Clint Burgess
“I GET TO DO WHAT I LOVE EVERYDAY, WORKING WITH BRILLIANT PEOPLE. THIS HAS BEEN THE FIRST JOB WHERE I AM EXCITED TO GET TO WORK AND DO MY BEST TO MAKE AN IMPACT. I FEEL VALUED AND RESPECTED BY A GROUP OF PEOPLE THAT ARE SECOND TO NONE, WHICH BY ITSELF, IS EVERYTHING.”
People, Brian Bell
“IT’S THE PEOPLE. BLOOMREACH’S TECHNOLOGY IS INCREDIBLE AND THE IMPACT WE’RE MAKING IN THE LIVES OF OUR CUSTOMERS IS IMPORTANT, BUT AT A FUNDAMENTAL LEVEL I WOULD ONLY WORK FOR A PLACE WHERE I FELT VALUED, AUTHENTIC AND IMPACTFUL. BLOOMREACHERS MAKE ME FEEL THAT WAY.”
Product Marketing, Madeline Ng
62
“PEOPLE HERE ARE INCREDIBLY SMART, BUT THEY’RE NOT OBNOXIOUS OR CONDESCENDING. I FEEL LIKE I CAN TALK TO ANYONE HERE, INCLUDING OUR EXECS FREELY AND COMFORTABLY. I HAVE NEVER FELT THAT MUCH AT EASE TO DO THAT BEFORE. IT TOOK A BIT TO GET USED TO THAT.”
Recruiting, Dayna Wu
“I WALK INTO WORK EVERY DAY WITH A BIG SIMILE ON MY FACE KNOWING I WORK WITH SOME AMAZING PEOPLE WHO ARE ON A LIFE-CHANGING JOURNEY TOGETHER.”
Sales, Rob Lawrence
“I STILL WORK AT BLOOMREACH BECAUSE OF THE PEOPLE AND THE TECHNOLOGY. WE HAVE A REALLY SMART GROUP OF FOLKS WHO ARE ALL PUSHING IN THE SAME DIRECTION. WHILE OUR GROWTH HAS BEEN FANTASTIC IN THE LAST 3 1/2 YEARS WE STILL MAINTAIN THAT START-UP MENTALITY.”
Sales, Bob Wooley
63
“IT’S KIND OF A KINDERGARTEN FOR ADULTS, WHICH IS A DREAM.”
Product Engagement, Ivan Landabaso
“WHEN NEW HIRES JOIN BLOOMREACH, THEY’RE GIVEN A PRESENTATION ABOUT HOW IMPORTANT THEIR FRESH PERSPECTIVE WILL BE, AND THEY’RE ENCOURAGED TO SPEAK UP AND MAKE CHANGES FROM THEIR VERY FIRST DAY. INNOVATION ISN’T JUST AN OVERARCHING CONCEPT HERE...IT ’S THE FOUNDATION UPON WHICH ALL OF OUR TOP ACHIEVERS ARE BUILT.”
Recruiting, Alyssa Clang
“BLOOMREACH IS LIKE NO OTHER PLACE I’VE EVER WORKED. THEY CARE ABOUT YOU BEYOND JUST BEING AN EMPLOYEE. THE EXEC TEAM’S GOAL IS TO MAKE THIS THE MOST REWARDING WORK EXPERIENCE OF OUR CAREERS AND THEY WORK HARD TO ENSURE THIS IS TRUE.”
Marketing, Meredith Gadoury
64
65