“It’s not about the products. It’s not about the technology. It’s not about the sales. It’s not about the customers. It’s what we believe.”
Is it possible to create an organizational culture before you even have a company? Raj De Datta, Co-Founder and CEO of Bloomreach, explains that he developed the cultural framework for Bloomreach before the company launched.
Key Insights
Sometimes, experience beats out education.
When faced with the choice between staying with the company he was working with or going to Harvard Business School, Raj chose to stay with the company. He took off to Europe – a place he’d never been – to help run a business that was still in its early stages. Don’t be afraid to take that leap when a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity pops up.
“I started to help them get it started, and started to work on it. And then I was like – I can’t just leave. I’m loving this too much. I tried to defer Harvard… they said ‘No, you can’t do that,’ so I was like, ‘I’m not gonna go back to business school. I’m just gonna do this. It’s just too fun.’”
Catastrophe can be a chance to pivot.
When the numbers are bad and getting worse, it might be easy to think that it’s time to throw in the towel. But sometimes, pivoting can be enough. Just one good product can often turn things around.
“Somewhere around years five or six, we started to experience massive, catastrophic declines in revenue and customers. We had known it was a risk, but it all started to come to pass… fortunately, we had been building what we today think of as the commerce experience cloud. So around 2015 and 2016 – around six years into this journey – we launched this new offering… the company we have today, which has been a rocket ship success.”
Why personalization has changed the face of ecommerce
Bloomreach is out to help companies reach their customers in a more efficient way, and the company is doing just that – its data shows that using Bloomreach can increase revenue by 8.5 percent per visitor.
“If you go to gap.com and you’re searching – that’s Bloomreach. If you go to rei.com – the content of that website is served up by Bloomreach. We’re powering eCommerce websites, and people would often come to us and say, ‘Hey, Bloomreach, can you help us personalize that experience?’We say, ‘Sure, yeah. Just give us all your data about your customers and your first-party data.’”
About the Guest:
Raj De Datta is Co-Founder and CEO of Bloomreach, a leading software platform for digital commerce experiences that powers brands representing 25% of retail E-Commerce in the US and the UK. Raj is a multiple-time entrepreneur. Raj is also the best-selling author of “The Digital Seeker” – a playbook for digital teams to win big.
Before launching Bloomreach, he was entrepreneur-in-residence at Mohr-Davidow Ventures, served as Cisco’s director of product marketing, and was on the founding team of telecom company FirstMark Communications. Raj also worked in technology investment banking at Lazard Freres. Raj serves on the Council for Player Development for the US Tennis Association, as a Founder Partner at seed stage venture capital firm Founder Collective and an individual investor in over 20 start-ups.”
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