Sales veteran to lead rapidly-expanding sales team to deliver next-generation personalized recommendations to top retailers worldwide
San Francisco – November 19, 2008 – RichRelevance™, the leading provider of next-generation personalized product recommendations that enhance the shopping experience and drive sales, today announced a wide-scale expansion of its sales team, led by Vice President of Sales Tyler Hoffman, who previously spent seven years building and running PayPal’s enterprise sales team. Mr. Hoffman will direct RichRelevance’s expanding team of seasoned sales representatives, sales engineers and account managers.
“Tyler is a fantastic sales executive with deep experience working with the world’s top online retailers,” said David Selinger, CEO of RichRelevance. “With executive sales background at innovative companies like CNET and PayPal, Tyler clearly understands the value RichRelevance provides to retailers, which now more than ever need the best tools to improve the shopping experience and boost revenues.”
Hoffman brings over a decade of retail-focused internet sales expertise to RichRelevance, where he will be responsible for developing and servicing top online retail customers, helping them obtain significant sales lift through the RichRelevance SaaS platform. Prior to RichRelevance, Tyler was head of PayPal’s enterprise sales team, with a focus on internet retail and the services sectors, as well as market development of strategic categories such as the airline vertical. Before joining PayPal, Tyler was Sales Director for San Francisco-based Internet pioneer CNET, where his four-year tenure included work on CNET’s development of Shopper.com, one of the first comparison-shopping engines.
“In today’s competitive online retail market, retailers are seeking powerful tools to efficiently boost sales. RichRelevance’s recommendations platform is one of the best offerings on the market to help retailers sell more and sell smarter,” said Hoffman. “RichRelevance is assembling a stellar sales team of seasoned retail experts, well-armed to help merchants improve their businesses.”
Hoffman joins RichRelevance at a time of rapid growth, as the company continues to attract top talent from leading Internet and e-commerce companies such as Amazon.com, CleverSet, Microsoft, CVS.com, and Redfin.com. In the past six months alone, RichRelevance has doubled its staff and continues to hire aggressively to meet the skyrocketing demand for its SaaS-based personalized offering. In July, the company welcomed Todd Pearson, former Vice President of Sales at PayPal, as Chief Customer Officer, and in October hired Darren Vengroff, former Principal Engineer at Amazon.com, as Chief Scientist. In addition to staff expansion, the company recently added a fifth data center to its cloud computing network architecture to support its growing list of top-tier clients, including two of the ten largest online retailers in the world.
RichRelevance is the market and technology leader in next-generation personalized recommendations for leading eCommerce sites, including Sears.com. Founded by the former head of Amazon’s Personalization R&D team, the company’s products increase sales by 10-30% by personalizing the shopping experience through targeted merchandising. The RichRelevance recommendations platform outperforms popular collaborative filtering-based solutions through the use of more than 15 recommendation types, cross-placement optimization, and a closed-feedback loop. The SaaS-based offering is easily integrated, and empowers merchandisers through a robust, patent-pending suite of dashboard controls. The company is privately held and headquartered in San Francisco, California.
The harder retailers work to get us to buy on their products, it seems, the lazier we can be.
Who needs to go into the store now that product recommendation engine RichRelevance and interactive marketing firm, and member of the Augmented Reality (AR) Consortium, Zugara just unveiled Fashionista, a solution that allows shoppers to try on items using a computer and Webcam.
by David Selinger
Anticipating that a financial crisis like the one we’re currently experiencing wasn’t far away, I’ve run my company, richrelevance, on a zero-fat budget, raising small rounds of capital to ensure our team built the discipline to operate with small budgets. Yet, anticipation of the downturn does not make me immune to the shift. External risks in every business have changed. None of us will go through the next 18 months without significant impact.
RichRelevance continues to attract the best technical and eCommerce talent to execute on its vision of next-generation personalization, recommendations and merchandising
San Francisco – October 30, 2008 – RichRelevance™, the leading provider of next-generation personalized product recommendations that enhance the shopping experience and drive sales, today announced that it is continuing to expand its software-as-a-service infrastructure to deliver the best performance, reliability and scalability for retailers this holiday season. The company added a fifth data center to its cloud computing network architecture to support increased holiday traffic for its rapidly-growing list of Tier-1 retail clients, which includes two of the top ten online retailers.
“I know first-hand from my time at Amazon.com that performance, reliability and scalability are the most important issues facing retailers during the holiday crunch,” said Darren Vengroff, Chief Scientist at RichRelevance. “With 25 – 40% of their annual sales on the line, there is no way that online merchants can afford downtime or poor performance, especially in the current economic climate. We are excited to be the first vendor in our space to have not only one fully redundant data center—but five.”
Designed to deliver peace of mind to high-volume retailers, the RichRelevance infrastructure was built by a team of experts, including renowned IT expert Elya Kurktchi, who architected the infrastructures of Akamai, Hotmail and Qualcomm.
RichRelevance is the only recommendations provider to take a cloud computing approach, which is a proven model for delivering enterprise-grade performance, scalability and reliability. According to a March 2008 Forrester report, cloud computing has become “wildly popular” for the benefits it brings in deployment speed, increased reliability and reduced operating costs, and has been adopted by such technology giants as HP, IBM, Google and AT&T. In taking this approach, RichRelevance protects its customers and their brands by preserving the user experience through traffic spikes or rushes.
The RichRelevance data architecture features multiple, mirrored, redundant servers in distributed data centers in San Diego, California; Lansing, Michigan; Dallas, Texas; Houston, Texas; and now San Francisco, California.
RichRelevance is the market and technology leader in next-generation personalized recommendations for leading eCommerce sites. Founded by the former head of Amazon’s Personalization R&D team, the company’s products increase sales by 10-30% by personalizing the shopping experience through targeted merchandising. The RichRelevance recommendations platform outperforms popular collaborative filtering-based solutions through the use of more than 15 recommendation types, cross-placement optimization, and a closed-feedback loop. The SaaS-based offering is easily integrated, and empowers merchandisers through a robust, patent-pending suite of dashboard controls. The company is privately held and headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Online recommendation service richrelevance taps Darren Vengroff, formerly of Amazon.com, as Chief Scientist.
Renowned computer scientist Darren Vengroff has taken on a new role as richrelevance’s chief scientist. He’ll be leading tech strategy and development, as well as working closely with CEO David Selinger. Vengroff previously was CTO of and co-founded Pelago, a company best known for its Twitter mobile app, Whrrl. Earlier, he served as principal engineer at Amazon.com.