The following interview is a conversation we had with Raj De Datta, CEO & Co-founder of Bloomreach, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Raj De Datta, CEO & Co-founder of Bloomreach: $450 Million to Build the World’s Leading Commerce Experience Cloud

 

Raj De Datta
Thanks for having me,Brett. Great to be here with you. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before we begin talking about what you’re building there, can we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?

Raj De Datta
Have absolutely. Yeah. So I’m  Raj De Datta. I’m CEO and co-founder of Bloomreach, and I’ve been a multiple time entrepreneur, so I’ve been in this entrepreneurial world for pretty much my whole professional life, all very shortly after graduating from college, which was a little bit of a time ago. And so I’ve been an entrepreneur multiple times over and now excited to be building and running Bloom Reach, which we think of as commerce experience cloud, which, in a nutshell, the way I think about that is that all of us live our lives digitally at this point. We’re all shopping online all the time. And Bloomberg is really in the business of making sure that every ecommerce interaction and experience that you have as a consumer as you’re shopping around is amazing, personalized, on point, and in so doing, helping the brands that power those experiences engage and acquire and grow their customers.

Brett
I have so many questions to ask you about Bloomrich, but before I dive into that list, I want to ask you a couple of questions that we like to go through just to better understand what makes you tick as a founder. So, sure, the first one would be what founder or CEO do you admire the most, and what do you admire about them and what have you learned from them? 

Raj De Datta
Yeah, so it’s really interesting, I think, that in 2023, we call founder a profession because all of us, I think, come at this in so many different ways. In my case, I didn’t intend to be a founder. I studied engineering. I got exposed to business a little bit, and then I kind of got accidentally drafted into my first startup and so fell in love with the entrepreneurial process that I was like, this is what I want to spend the rest of my life doing. And so the good thing about knowing that at 22, 23 years old is you don’t waste a lot of time doing anything else. And along the way, I think the great thing is there have been so many great founders and entrepreneurs that I’ve met that have influenced my thinking. Probably the one that I consider the model entrepreneur in many ways is Jeff Bezos and what he’s built at Amazon. 

 
Raj De Datta
And I say that because specifically Amazon, I think, has broken the narrative of, hey, it’s only possible to build one great business. They’ve innovated in so many different domains in what are ultimately really difficult low margin categories. And so I just think it wasn’t just one big thing like Search, or one big thing like social networking that pays the bills. It was sort of like building multiple entrepreneurial ventures within one company, which today we know as Amazon. So the Everything Store, which is a book that’s written about that, is one that I recommend to all entrepreneurs, just about the relentlessness with which that business got built. And I take that to heart every day when we’re building Bloom Reach. 

Brett
And I think Amazon’s very well known for their customer obsession. They talk about it a lot publicly. And as a consumer, you can really feel it every time you use Amazon. Is that something that Bloom Reach has as well? Is that a top core value, focus and obsession? 

Raj De Datta
It totally is. I think what Amazon does that’s less talked about in the customer obsession is core to the business model of Amazon in the sense that if their customer obsessed, then they acquire more customers. If they have more customers, they get more scale. If they get more scale, they pass on more savings to consumers. They get to build marketplace businesses and the like, and AWS costs less. So all these things are interrelated. In fact, what I took away from the customer obsession is it’s not good enough to take these monikers like Customer Obsession or do the Right Thing for people. It’s really about tying it into a flywheel that works. And so for Bloomberg, we built our own flywheel that’s different than Amazon’s, but is really tied into this idea that, hey, if we can acquire more customers, then we can get more data. 

Raj De Datta
If we can get more data, then our models perform better, which means we can deliver more business value to our customers, which then means they’re more likely to invest with us, which then means the ecosystem grows, and which then in turn feeds the flywheel to then keep acquiring more customers and grow the business. So we’ve tried to model that flywheel effect that Amazon has. 

 
Brett
Wow, that’s super fascinating. We’ll dig into that here shortly. One last question for you. I know you mentioned the Everything Store there, but apart from that book, can you think of a book that’s had a major impact on you as a founder? This can be a traditional business book or just a personal book that influenced how you view the world.

Raj De Datta
Yeah, I like zero to one as well. I think that’s a pretty good one for the earliest stage. If sort of like the Everything Store tells you how you scale out relentless way, all kinds of great at scale businesses, zero to one. On the other side is tackling the other side of the movie, which is sort of like, what if the script isn’t written at all? How do you write the first version of the script? And I think about that a lot because I think in many ways, as a founder of an at scale business, the key quality is to step into one meeting and say, how are we going to go take over? The world and step into another meeting and say, how can we invent something from scratch that disrupts ourself? Or that moves the needle on something in a day, one context? 

 
Raj De Datta
And so I think bouncing between those two mindsets is key. 

 
Brett
Super interesting. All right, now let’s dive into Bloom Reach here. So unlike some of the other companies that I’ve had on, you’ve been around for a long time, most of the startups we talked to, they’re a couple of years old. You founded the company in 2009, is that correct? 

 
Raj De Datta
That’s right. And I’ll tell you that unvarnished story here, which is basically if I were to summarize the Bloomberg’s journey over the last 13 years, now 14 years, it was like a rocket ship in its earliest days. It was a total disaster in the middle, and then it’s been a rocket ship again. And so it’s really like a tale of three chapters over 14 years. Kind of the first. I would say five or six years were glorious. The middle, like three or four years were really rough. And then the last six years or so have been amazing again. And so it’s a long journey, but maybe the untold story of so many startups, which is that most of these untold stories are not as up into the right as you would think when.

Brett
You look at yeah, I can imagine. So take me back then to 2009, early days of Bloom Reach. Where did the idea come from and why did you settle on this idea? And what were the inspirations there as you were getting going? 

Raj De Datta
Yeah, it’s hard to remember this, but these were days when Facebook and Google were the primary companies, amazon along with it. Early days of sort of like first ten years of ecommerce and the Internet. And our thought process at the time, to put it really simply, was one day billions of people are going to live their lives online, and the quality of the digital interactions is going to be as important as the quality of every physical interaction we have. And so let’s go build the kind of platform where if any of us are online, every digital interaction is amazing and speaks to us and is personalized and feels like our best friend knows us. And so we set out to be able to build bloomberg, really to fulfill that vision and call it magical and measurable experiences for people in business. And in those earliest days, that was like a very grandiose vision. 

Raj De Datta
But the key question was, okay, what’s holding us back? And what we felt was holding us back was you couldn’t possibly hire enough human beings to curate every website, every app interaction, and make it work for every consumer that was going to go visit those apps and websites. You’d really have to be using data and data science to inform that and to make it such that at scale, every one of these interactions was magical. But machines and data science had to play a key role in it. So when I think about those earliest days, we pulled together some of the core engineers that involved in building the search engine at Google and the newsfeed at Facebook and said, hey, let’s turn the problem around. Let’s not go build a Google or a Facebook. Let’s go build the platform for everybody else to deliver that quality of interactions. 

 

Raj De Datta
And it was a group of five or six of us that came together to make that happen, and we got started.

Brett
Now, that all sounds great, recruiting people from Google and Facebook, that’s probably the dream for a lot of founders listening in, how’d you do it, though? How’d you convince them to leave those roles and join you and what you’re trying to build when it sounds like it was just really an idea and a vision that you had. 

 
Raj De Datta
It really was. And I think the idea was powerful to begin with, right? This idea that, hey, Google might serve billions of consumers who know what they’re looking for, but for the billions of websites out there, how are they going to deliver a Google like experience or a Facebook like experience? Let’s go. It was a powerful vision, and powerful visions are important when all you have is a dream in the earliest days, and the dream better be worth it. And so I think that was the first thing. But the second thing we did that was interesting was we roped in an early investor. So I incubated this idea with Dame Capital Ventures and a partner I knew there. And so as I was doing that, it became possible to then go to potential employees and say, look, there’s a pretty high probability this venture gets funded in the first place, which is always a risk in its earliest days. 

 
Raj De Datta
So by taking out that risk, were able to get the attention of some really good people. And then the final decision we made was not to hire a lot of people. We actually were able to get $5 million in the bank pretty early, but we only had five or six people in the company for the first, probably 18 months, so we didn’t hire a lot of people. And thesis behind that was the key to solving really hard problems is to have the right people, but also to give yourself the room to fail a bunch of times. And so were able to kind of, I think, put the triangle together between right people, big vision and money and then be able to iterate on that for a long period of time until it really came together. 

 
Brett
And in those early days, did you encounter people who didn’t believe in that vision and question if the vision could actually happen? 

 
Raj De Datta
Yeah, no doubt about it. I mean, I think one of the key questions that we would get in its earliest days was, look, I don’t think you can build a platform that’s going to power every website, every app out there, without turning into a professional services business. Like can you build software that can personalize every interaction for categories as different as selling groceries online and selling Cinserve products online? So I mean, these are pretty different offerings and so I don’t think you can do that. So there was a lot of technical risk questions that we would get. We would certainly also get questions about like, how are you going to get started and challenge the giants? That’s the usual question that we would get. So there were a ton of naysayers, as there always are, and then can. 

 
Brett
You just paint a picture for us of what the tech ecosystem looked like in the Bay Area back then in 2009? What was that starting point like for you? 

 
Raj De Datta
Yeah, that’s a great point as well. I mean, for one thing, it was kind of a tough economic time much as it is right now. In fact, I think the hardest economic time before now when we’re experiencing tech layoffs left, right and center was 2009 and 2010. We’ve gone through a ten year plus period of time where the world hasn’t experienced this, but that was a period of time after the financial crisis where there was no venture funding, where people were worried about any business that had capital needs. It was not a robust entrepreneurial environment at all. 

Brett
Yeah, that makes sense. That’s very useful information for people to hear, I think now as they’re potentially starting a company in the current climate today, which doesn’t seem to be ideal. 

 
Raj De Datta
Well, actually the best time to start in my mind is in the worst economic times. That sounds like a weird thing to say, but when you want the good economic times is when your venture is like hitting on all cylinders and that usually takes a few years. So often what happens when you start in the best times is money is plentiful, but people are hard to hire. It’s really expensive, it’s a lot of competitive noise out there. So only one out of the like, ten things you need to start a successful venture is easy and that’s getting mutton. The other nine are actually pretty hard in good economic times. The exact reverse is true. In bad economic times, it’s hard to get mutton, no doubt about that. But if you have money, it’s easier to craft value propositions that are really real. If customers buy your stuff, they’ll probably buy even more of it. 

Raj De Datta
In good times, it forces a level of focus and discipline because you have less money to work with than you tend to have. It’s easier to get the best people to come. The people that come for the right reasons. They aren’t doing it just because it’s cool to be at a startup, because it probably doesn’t pay all that well and it has a lot of risk. There’s just so many good things that come from starting ventures and bad times. 

Brett
Yeah, I can see that. Now, something else I’d like to zoom in on, just because you mentioned it, is it sounds like the messy middle there. So the middle point of the company, what years did that begin? Where it started to have some hard times. 

Raj De Datta
I think the hardest years were around 2015, 2016 for us, so kind of like six years. And that’s what makes Bloomberg a weird story. Usually the hardest times are the earliest times. Like, you struggle early, you don’t find product market fit. You amble along, that takes a while, and then either it peters out or it works out. But Bloomberg was not that case. I think we had, like, the ultimate false positive. We had a first product that really was, like, selling really well, but was kind of a mirage. It wasn’t going to last. So around 2015, it was really clear that this business that we had built, which by then had probably 100 and 5180 people, was not going to last. And so we had two choices. We either could shut the whole thing down, despite the fact that it had this early success, or we could build a completely new business on the same tech and on the same value proposition and on the same vision and with the same cultural roots.

Raj De Datta
And that’s what we chose to do. And so what was so difficult about, like, as you call it, the messy middle, was were sort of, like, had a business that was declining and having to build a brand new startup, largely in 2015, 2016, that was almost at ground zero, and build that to what Bloomberg is today. And if I look at what Bloomberg is today, which publicly we’ve announced is more than 150,000,000 of annual recurring revenue, and I think about that original business that we had in 2015 or 2016, like a million dollars of it is from that original business. The rest of it has been built in the last six years. 

 
Brett
And what was wrong with the product? Or why was that declining so much? 

 
Raj De Datta
So the original product was an SEO product. It was basically using algorithms to optimize websites for SEO. And as you know, SEO is, like, dominated by google and very difficult to predict what happens with the traffic that you get to a given website. So it was sort of like were building a product whose destiny we did not control. And that meant you could have good years or bad years, good quarters and bad quarters, but ultimately, you couldn’t influence the long term success of it, because ultimately, the SEO ecosystem is controlled by Google, not by anyone else. They have 90% market share in search. So it’s a very difficult place to build a business. It’s kind of you’re really inhabiting a planet that you don’t control fundamentally. And that was the core issue with it. It actually was a relatively large business at that point, but not one we could believe would be an at scale business and an independent software company that would create tremendous value. 

 
Brett
And what was that like internally, making that change? Was that hard to communicate with the team and with investors of, hey, I know it feels like we have a good business here, but the reality is we don’t. And if we don’t make a change soon, we’re going to be gone. What were those conversations like? And then another question on top of that is, what was your psychology like as the founder, entrepreneur, and the CEO of this company? How were you taking care of yourself and making sure that you were fresh as you were having these conversations and making these types of decisions? 

 
Raj De Datta
Yeah, so it was some of the most difficult years of being a founder and being the CEO of the company. Because if there’s one thing you count on from your leader, it’s clarity of, where are we going and why? And I was myself, not very clear, right? So I remember standing up in front of a room of people back in 2015, 2016, saying, look, we have this business. It’s in decline. It’s kind of not looking good, frankly. But we have a lot of incredible assets. We have great tech, we have great customers, we have a great culture and a great group of people in this room. And I don’t know how long it’s going to take for us to go build something new that creates an incredibly valuable company. But what I know is, I’m here, we’re here. These are our assets. If you want to be on this journey with me, stick around, and I won’t fault you if you don’t. 

Raj De Datta
And there was just an incredible catharsis in recognizing the lack of clarity and being honest about it. And incredibly, a lot of people were like, look, Raj, if you’re here, I’m here. We’re going to figure this out together. That’s what we sign up for. And a lot of people made that choice, and I think are grateful for having made that choice during those years. And it forged a fabric of an incredibly resilient company thereafter. And as far as me personally, I had the good fortune of having like a super stable family and just kind of life situation without which I don’t think the volatility of doing this could make sense. And then the other thing I told myself was, look, you just got to stop thinking about whether you want to do this or not. That’s not fair to your investors or to the people on the team. 

 
Raj De Datta
I either have to be all in or all out, but there is no in between. And so I almost told myself, look, I’m just not going to think about whether this makes rational sense. I’m just going to make it happen. And until the day when I give up making it happen, I’m just going to be 100% all in and convey that. And that was really important as well because me being so all in caused a few other people to be all in, who caused a few other people to be all in. And we pulled it off. 

 
Brett
So amazing. Really appreciate you telling this type of story. I feel like a lot of times with startups, you only hear about the good times and then maybe there’s the hard times at the start, but then it’s mostly just the good times that they reflect on. So really appreciate your vulnerability and sharing some of that pain you guys went through in the middle stage. Now let’s talk about the growth stage. There kind of that third chapter that you’re in, it sounds like. When did things really begin to take off and head in the right direction? When you moved into that new product. 

 
Raj De Datta
Yeah, so we started to build kind of a new product and launched it, and it started to have some traction around 2016. But to give you a sense, sort of like the new product was like a million dollars of revenue and the declining old product was like 20 something. So I saw that it was working back to that. Like, you always have to have a zero to one mentality. I knew there was a kernel of something that was going to build a great company. It did not seem apparent in 2016 to sort of the rest of the world, to our investors, to the broader industry. It kind of looked like Bloomberg was just struggling along because the outside metrics didn’t look very good. But I knew we had the kernel of a new startup that was going to make it and work as early as like a year into this around 2016. 

 
Raj De Datta
And so we just stayed at it for the one, became bigger and bigger and started to compound. And pretty soon by like five years later in 2020, people woke up and they were like, man, this company is like a pretty large company that got built along the way. We just didn’t pay a lot of attention to it. And so it was clearer to me many years before it was clear to the rest of Silicon Valley but by 2020, we had gone out and raised money at over a billion dollars. And people were like, Where did this company come from? I thought it died five years ago. 

 
Brett
It just sounds like such an insane level of perseverance and really patience on your end, because when you’re talking about five years, that was already, what, six years into the journey. So these aren’t small frames, and I think a lot of people in tech and just in life in general think on these rather short time frames. So how did you train yourself to be okay with sticking it out for so many years? Even if we just look at that five year stretch where you launch the new product and to see that through, how do you keep it going? 

 
Raj De Datta
Yeah, so the story is even crazier because in those five years, were not able to raise any money. So you talked about the $450,000,000, and that’s true, but the reality is it was $100 million before 2015 and $350,000,000 after 2020. So between 2015 and 2020, there was no money. Wow. The thing we had to do is we had to rely on the cash flow from our customers to fund the business and almost, like, operate like a bootstrap startup and then go raise money much later. So those five years were very hard. I think, to be honest, I’m not sure. I knew it would take five years to go make that happen. I think I kept telling myself it was just around the corner, and just around the corner became five years. And that just kind of kept me going. But I did believe, like, early on, I saw the traction, I saw the customer value, I saw the product working.

Raj De Datta
I did believe. I remember wishing it would go faster, but I went from doubt to conviction, and that helped the years go by. And yeah, I did ask myself at a variety of times, like, is this the right thing to be using time? And everyone’s sort of career is valuable in terms of where we all spend our time, but were building something amazing. I still very much it was the same core vision I had back in 2009. I believed it in my bones, and I had a great team. And so I felt like I had some assets that if I were to go leave and start something else, I would have to rebuild. 

 
Brett
In that time period, do you recall your darkest moment or darkest period of time where you ever just sitting there in your office or on a walk just thinking like, S***. Or, how do I get out of this situation? 

 
Raj De Datta
I did. Not one time, but with regularity. I remember going for walks with my wife or with some of the key folks, including our COO, who stuck around through that period of time and being like, Is this going to work? Our investors. I remember having conversations with them, being like, look, I just want to be honest with you. I could completely lose all of your money. I remember one conversation that was a pivotal one, which around that time, I brought in an independent board member. Until that time, we had always only had investors on the board. And I brought in an independent board member who had been a founder and CEO of a company that today is worth billions of dollars and is publicly traded. His name is Marcus Ryu, and he’s the founder and chairman of a company called Guidewire Software. And I remember Marcus telling me a near death story of his own company that later was very successful. 

 
Raj De Datta
And we really related to each other because I felt like had a certain kinship in having a shared experience. And I remember telling marcus I was struggling with the current business and this new business, and he just looked at me in the eye and asked me a couple of very simple questions. Number one. Is the planet you’re on inhabitable or do you need to go find a new planet? Number two. If the answer is you need to go, it’s not inhabitable. You need to go find a new planet or a new product or a new business. Do you believe you have an unfair advantage and you have conviction that you’re going to find that planet? And number three, do you look around the room and say, these are the people in the foxhole? And if the answer to that is those three questions are yes, nothing else really matters. 

Raj De Datta
And it provided me just an incredible emotional and mental strength to have someone to talk to, because it wasn’t that easy to talk to our investors, to many of our team members, about all of the mental ups and downs that would come along with this, because there were a lot of dark moments, for sure.

Brett
Yeah, it certainly sounds like it now. I think I read in one of the funding announcements it was 2022 that you did the $175,000,000 round. Is that right? 

 
Raj De Datta
That’s right? Yes. That was early January of 22. 

Brett
What was that day like when that was all signed? What was going through your head? How’d you feel.

Raj De Datta
Yeah, I was super relieved and super happy to have the money in 2021. We had a spectacular year, and were coming off an amazing time. And were saying to ourselves, let’s strengthen our balance sheet. Let’s make sure we have the capital to invest for the future. And we did. And we found a great investor, Goldman Sachs, that invested in the business. And when that money came through, there was just a feeling of look, we control our own destiny. Now it’s just up to us. We can build a multibillion dollar company at scale and we have the capital to do it. Obviously, we have the business to support that round. But yeah. Is there a feeling of exuberance? To accomplish that. And that takes exactly like five minutes, and then you start being like, okay, what’s the next mountain to climb? That’s how it felt.

Brett
Yeah, I can imagine it’s an insane moment followed by probably a little bit of panic of, okay, now what do we do? 

Raj De Datta
I’ve had moments of panic, but I wouldn’t describe panic. It was more like, all right, with great power comes great responsibility. Someone’s given us 170,000,000. How are we going to make this a 500 million dollar arr business, billion dollar revenue business? It sort of like makes those ambitions that you talk about in decks very real, and you’re like, okay, let’s give this a shot. It’s pretty cool.

Brett
It’s very cool. And Goldman Sachs. That’s an interesting investor. I feel like you don’t hear them, or at least I don’t hear about them investing in tech that often. Am I wrong there? Do they do a lot of tech investments or was there something specific they were looking at when they invested in Bloom Reach, do you think? 

 
Raj De Datta
I think they do a set of at scale tech investments. Right. By then, Bloom Reach was well over $100 million in revenue. It had hundreds, thousands of brands that were on the platform. So there was like, no risk the company was going to go under at that point. 

Brett
Right. 

Raj De Datta
So when Goldman invested, by then it was an at scale business. It was growing well. It had clear market traction. So they weren’t investing, I would say, in a tech startup anymore. They were investing in a growth stage technology company that was going to be around. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. Now let’s zoom out a little bit more and just talk about the very high level product that you have today. So what is that high level product that you’re paying for?

Raj De Datta
Yeah. So Bloombridge we think of as a commerce experience cloud. But to make it really simple, we all shop online. And let’s say we’re buying a pair of shoes or buying a laptop or whatever it is, the first thing that’s going to happen is a brand is going to engage us. Apple is going to engage us, or Kohan is going to engage us to their brand and say, hey, maybe you’re in the market for a pair of shoes. And that’s going to happen through email, SMS, web ads, all the marketing channels. So the first offering we have, we call Bloom Reach Engagement. It engages more customers to brands. It delivers highly personalized email messages, SMS messages, websites, ads, to engage more customers and say, hey, if you’re in market for something, you get exposed to the brand. Then the second part of our offering is, all right, I’ve got an email message on the pair of shoes.

Raj De Datta
I’m going to click through and go to the website. And now I’m actually looking for the exact pair of shoes that meets my needs. Maybe it’s hiking or maybe it’s to go out or whatever it might be. And we’ll power the website, we’ll power the search box, the content, the navigation menus, and we’ll guide you to the right product. And once you have added the pair of shoes to your cart, then the Bloom Reach part of the journey ends and it goes into a lot of the back end transactional systems to enable you to actually buy the product, get it shipped to your house, get the fulfillment to work, all of that. So Bloom Reach, the reason we call it an ecommerce experience is it’s basically the core shopping experience that you have online for thousands of brands. And you don’t know this, but hundreds of billions of dollars of transactions on big websites like a Williams Sonoma if you’re buying cookware, or an Rei if you’re buying hiking gear, or an Olakai if you’re buying sandals, behind the scenes, it’s all powered by Bloomreach. 

 
Brett
And could you give us an idea of just the numbers that we’re working with here? I think I read on LinkedIn 850 brands trust you. Any other numbers you can share just so we can try to understand the scale? Because I know it’s a massive scale that you’re talking about.

Raj De Datta
Yeah. So the scale that we’re talking about is almost a quarter of consumer facing ecommerce in the US. And the UK is at some point touched by Bloomreach.

Brett
Wow. 

 
Raj De Datta
So you load a web page, it’s calling Bloombridge in the back end and showing you the web page. You use an app, you send an email, you get an email message in your inbox. You get an SMS message. There’s a decent chance, there’s a one in four chance, almost, that Bloom Reach played a role in determining what to show you at that moment. And it’s using. We have almost 30 patents pending around various AI technology that is trying to figure out what do I put in front of you as a consumer right now that increases the probability that you engage with this brand, get the experience you’re looking for, and that ultimately the brand gains customers and serves the most effective. 

 
Brett
And I’m sure there’s a long list of things, and it’s probably hard to narrow it down, but if we had to just pick a few things that you got right, what would you say that those are? How were you able to rise above the noise and just really dominate the market in the way that you have? 

Raj De Datta
I think we did a few things right. Number one, the core vision was right. Like, we’ve been at it for a long time, but the core vision of saying, hey, one day people are going to be shopping online, and the quality of product you show me, the content you show me, the blog article, you show me is going to make a big difference in my interaction with you as a brand. That core is just a good idea at scale to solve that problem. We believe the data was at the root of solving that problem. And were right about that, I think, as well. So I think the core premise was a really good premise. The market has been a really good market in ecommerce. But then I think what we did very effectively is we picked narrow parts of this problem gradually over the years and did a great job solving each piece. 

 
Raj De Datta
We didn’t show up and say, with this big idea, let’s go. It was, all right, let’s make search boxes really good, then let’s make Merchandising really good, let’s make the content really good. Let’s add email and make that really good. Now let’s add SMS. So we had a gradual playbook that followed the way people interacted with brands and shopped online, and we rolled it out gradually and did one step at a time really well. And I think that helped us as well, but always with our eye to an unflinching commitment to this vision. So were also not sidetracked by a lot of other things that were not core to that vision in doing so. And maybe the last thing I’ll say is the real secret sauce of the company is not the products in the market. It’s really what we are doing from a culture perspective to attract great people and to create the kind of operational environment that’s like just a force to be reckoned with. 

Raj De Datta
And so as companies have gone through all kinds of dislocations, whether it be COVID and work from anywhere, and offices shutting down or not, and the great resignation and now the great layoffs, we just haven’t dealt with very much of that and had very many problems. Like, we’ve just cruised through, and I don’t mean cruise through, and it hasn’t been a lot of hard work. It’s that we have built the kind of cultural playbook that it’s almost like an operating system for the company that always allows us to thrive and do it the right way.

Brett
And how did you build that cultural playbook? I’m sure that didn’t just pop up organically or naturally. That must have been a big push that you made, I would guess, at some point. Or how did that come about? 

Raj De Datta
Yeah, like everything at Bloomreach, I think it’s just all taken a really long time. So it was there in its earliest days, like we had written the values and culture before I even started the company. It’s the same document that we operate on today, 1314 years later. But what we did really well is we said we’re going to turn each of these core values into operational practices and we’re going to measure our success every quarter, every year, the same way we measure our revenue, the same way we measure our product success. So you go and do something for 13 years times four quarters, you just keep making it a little better and a Little Better, and Pretty Soon It’s Pretty Good, makes. 

Brett
A Lot Of Sense. Something else I wanted to ask about, and I know we’ve mentioned it a few times. Here is the ecommerce experience. Cloud. So the first question is, what are your general views when it comes to your market category? Is that your market category? Is it a different market category? And then the follow up question there is going to be what are your views in general when it comes to category creation? 

Raj De Datta
Yeah, I think we think of Commerce experience really as an umbrella category in many ways, where we serve the ecommerce market and we deliver great customer experiences within ecommerce. That’s why we call it a commerce experience. Cloud but we don’t think of ourselves as our priority is to go create a category because we operate in, I would say, two primary categories. One is The Customer Engagement Market, which is where Our marketing products work. And That’s Kind Of Half Our business. And Then The Other Half Of Our Business Is In Powering. Ecommerce Storefronts. And That’s A Second Market where We Serve Search And Navigation, and We Call Our Product There bloom reach Discovery. And so we really, I think, serve two markets with great products that work really well together to deliver on this vision of magical and measurable experiences. Highly personalized ecommerce interactions. But we don’t spend a lot of time saying, let’s go create the category. 

Raj De Datta
For that. We spend a lot of time saying, let’s go win our two markets and let’s deliver on this promise that when connected together, you can deliver a world class shopping experience. 

Brett
Interesting. And 13 years in. What motivates you to do things like this? Why are you talking to me? I saw a bunch of other podcasts that you’ve done in the past. I saw that you wrote a book. You’re a huge company, and a lot of the founders I speak to that are much smaller have this view that they don’t have time for these types of things. But it seems like you really invest in some of the smaller things and really try to spread your message. Is that an intentional strategy that you’ve always had? Or is it more that you’re at a level of success now where you can go back and do these types of things?

Raj De Datta
No doubt it’s harder to do these things in the earliest days. But I have a few motivations. I mean, the first is I’m obviously keen to make sure we tell the Bloomreach story, and that creates value for the company as a whole. But beyond that, I also see it as my responsibility. I’ve been an entrepreneur for 25 years, and I do think there is a glamorization of the profession that suggests that everything looks like Elon Musk or whatever it is. Mark Zuckerberg. And those aren’t the stories of the 99%. And I Really Want To Make sure that We Tell The Real story that we give people the courage to start these businesses and confront the obstacles that come along the way. And if my story helps motivate people and be motivated for the right reasons, then I feel like it’s part of my responsibility. Give back to the entrepreneurial community the way others gave to me. 

Brett
Wow, I love that. And I’m sure the founders listening in also appreciate that it’s hard to find people who are so open with their stories and share these vulnerable moments. So it’s very appreciated from myself and I’m sure from the audience as well. Now, last question here. Let’s end on a high note and talk about the next five years. So what’s the five year vision here for Bloom Reach? What’s it going to look like five years from today? 

 
Raj De Datta
We’re just, like, at an incredible time, right? So if I think about where we are in this world, on the one hand, we’re still 18% penetrated of Ecommerce as a percentage of retail. So there’s like, a long way to go before digital actually takes over a lot of commerce. We’re early innings in that regard. We’re early innings in this idea that we can use data to transform experiences that’s even earlier than the 18%. Much of our shopping journey is non personalized and doesn’t speak to us. So we have a long way to go to build a kind of profound experience, and then along come incredible technology trends like we’ve seen recently with OpenAI and Chat, GPT and large language models and things of that type. So technology keeps marching along to open up the possibilities to make this all happen. So when I think about the next five years, I mean, I think we could see a level of acceleration that when you put these forces together, it’s pretty remarkable for consumers to have a different quality of digital experience. 

 
Raj De Datta
And for businesses that are building online, I think you can reinvent the set of capabilities you could offer those consumers in the next five years in a way which we never could. So I’m excited for Bloomberg to be at the forefront of making this happen, but I think it’s early days. Wow. 

Brett
Fascinating to hear you say early days when you’ve been at it for so long.

Raj De Datta
Yeah, absolutely. It’s always day one. 

 
Brett
Yeah. Love that mindset. All right, Raj, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today’s interview before we wrap up. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build and execute on this vision, where’s the best place for them to go? 

 
Raj De Datta
Yeah, you can follow me on LinkedIn. That’s probably a good place to start. You can certainly find Bloom Reach online on all the social media platforms, and you can probably find us on Twitter as well. 

Brett
Awesome. Raj, thank you so much for taking the time to share your story and talk about everything that you’re doing here. This has been one of my favorite interviews and hope to have you back on in a couple of years. 

Raj De Datta
Absolutely. 

 

Brett
Keep in touch.