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

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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

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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.

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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.”

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“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

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“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

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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!

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“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

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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

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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

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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

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“ 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

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“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

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