Fortunate to have started my career working w/ such a great crew.
In 2011, Oracle acquired Boston based Endeca for $1.075B... ...while the Endeca company journey concluded in 2011, the story of its alumni is still very much being told at local Boston area anchor & growth businesses like Toast, Salsify, Jellyfish, CloudZero, Parallel Wireless, Manifold, Cimulate, Inc. and beyond who all have its Kendall Square roots. One count has Endeca alumni founding 25+ companies and Endeca alumni led companies have a market capitalization >$15B. Last summer I chatted with John Andrews (Cimulate), Steve Fredette (Toast), Andrew Lau Lau (Jellyfish), Vinay Seth Mohta Mohta (Manifold), Julie Yoo (a16z) and Steve Papa (Endeca Founder & CEO) to help understand what made the Endeca experience such a special part of their careers. The Endeca folks were intelligent, hardworking, found a great market, and stuck together to see the mission through. If it was anything, maybe one thing? It was the people. Led by a bold, inspiring, no frills leader – Steve Papa. These are their learnings: Unreasonable Things – Steve Papa and the early leadership team asked people to do unreasonable things. The people that signed up to work on those hard problems and stuck with it had a unique set of experiences, recruited like minded colleagues, and were forged by the experience Context & Timing – Endeca couldn’t raise money to build an application company because investors thought the e-commerce market was too small and uninteresting at the time. They had to build a platform in order to secure funding and people joined the team to build that platform company. There was a ton of valuable experience gained within the context of building horizontal & vertical platform strategies at an enterprise software company on the eve of the cloud revolution Power Functions & Special Ops – Many of Endeca’s most successful entrepreneurial alumni came from the “Special Operations” team, in Product & Sales roles, which gave them exposure to the entrepreneurial game. This team would go out to the field with prototypes, meet with customers, solicit feedback, and return to tweak their learnings to seed future product development. There, they obtained the “grit” of trying, failing, and trying again See It To Believe It – everyone referenced the value of seeing “what good looks like” or the first person perspective of experiencing product market fit as it was occurring. Having that personal, up close experience early in your career as a reference point was supremely valuable when they later went off to start new companies Validated Network – The network is a huge part of it. You can’t always see that at the beginning or even while you’re in the middle of it but a group that went through something meaningful and then were able to achieve a successful outcome were rewarded with capital, experience, talented colleagues and validation from their peers in the market We'll be recapping the series all week!
