Moving day.
This morning, we open the doors to our brand new San Francisco headquarters at 633 Folsom in downtown SOMA, San Francisco. This is an emotional moment for me as I reflect on all of the amazing moments that have accompanied our insane growth over the past 5 years.
Our first office was a small 2-bedroom apartment rented at the Avalon apartments in Hayward, CA—where despite the high local crime rate, we flourished, building out our first production server clusters and developing much of the core software which ultimately led to our seed financing in 2007. Our only brush with neighborhood crime was when my co-founder Mike DeCourcey and I went to the bank to deposit $500,000 from our initial investors. The bank got stood up, but our deposit cleared just fine—thank goodness!
Co-founder Tyler Kohn contemplating whiteboard technology—and yes this is after cleaning up a bit
So we moved.
We are in the midst of a technological revolution affecting everything about the shopping process: the simultaneous explosion of social, mobile and local technologies. It is in these transition points where our business decisions have the most impact—where companies are made and lost. Our true fundamental strengths—compared against our partners and competitors—must be considered in the context of an entirely new shopper: the Super Consumer.
With a multitude of resources at her fingertips, the Super Consumer can shop five stores at once through a multi-tabbed web browser. Smart phone in hand, she walks down the aisle of one store while teleporting a sales representative from another store, in order to shop competitively. She is fearless and opinionated, posting her shopping experiences to the blogosphere and social media channels. Thanks to the plethora of user-generated product reviews, recommendations and detail specifications already available, her knowledge is practically limitless. She knows much more than the store employee by the time she’s ready to buy.
Empowered by unprecedented access and connectivity, the Super Consumer has the unique power to redefine brands from the bottom-up, and drive the creation of new markets, new products, technological innovations, social media activities and general consumption.
It’s imperative for retailers and brands to understand the Super Consumer, how she shops and –most importantly – what makes her happy.
Beginning today in London and upcoming in New York (6/14) and Stanford University (9/18), Paco Underhill and I will be speaking about the macroeconomic and technological trends shaping this new Super Consumer and how we in retail need to hearken back to our roots in merchandising and marketing so that we can define our strategies on a battlefield increasingly shaped by rapidly growing players such as Groupon, Amazon, and even eBay.
Please join us as we discuss The Future of Shopping.
Zillow just acquired RentJuice for 40 Million dollars. Cool!
What’s that got to do with RichRelevance? Ok so I co-founded another real-estate company, Redfin, but that seems pretty far afield to justify a blog post…
Well, there’s more! I met Dave Vivero, the CEO of RentJuice when he was still at HBS and “contemplating his next big thing,” so when he moved to San Francisco, it was an obvious opportunity to help him out—RichRelevance incubated the early RentJuice team until they got their first round of funding (should have taken some stock—darnit!). I even introduced them to one of their lead investors on that round.
This is one example of the opportunity for more developed startups to help accelerate the entrepreneurial ecosystem—one example of what I believe to be many opportunities. Sometimes this means opening up your offices to a young company, or offering up a resource where you have slack within your business. It could be as simple as letting someone borrow your graphics guy for a few hours, or brainstorm their next version of their product.
I’ve helped other companies similarly (GoodReads and Interactive Touch Books), and will continue to because we believe that this pay-it-forward approach is critical for a healthy ecosystem. In fact, as a part of the pay-it-forward cycle, we were also the benefactor of a similar sub-leasing favor thanks to Tod and team at BrightRoll, who leant us a hand and some space when our salaries were still paid in sandwiches and hugs. Good Karma from BrightRoll set a precedent for our company and we have made it a point to ALWAYS pay-it-forward.
So the next time someone asks you if you have office-space to share, even if it’s a janitor’s closet, understand that you may be acting as a catalyst for something much more significant. You may even play a part in the creation of the next Billion-dollar startup (there seems to be quite a few these days)—and even the future billionaire’s of the world need help in early days because real estate in SV is ridiculously expensive.
Just ask the guys at Zillow and RentJuice.
As you may have seen, today we’ve announced some very exciting news regarding our acquisition of Searchandise Commerce. First of all, let me say that we’re thrilled about the combination of our companies. John Federman and his entire team at Searchanside have truly innovated within the Shopping Media industry, and the combination of our capabilities provides an incredible channel of value for both retailers and brands. By joining forces there is simply no company in the marketplace with a more powerful media offering within online retail. We couldn’t be more excited about the success that lies ahead of us. As importantly, the team members who’ve joined the RichRelevance family from Searchandise share so many of the {rr} values. Creating long-lasting value in the online retail world is just simply hard, so it’s paramount that our values are reflected across our core—by every one of our employees. The Searchandise product will be a key addition to our personalization platform. In these challenging economic times, Brand advertisers are being asked to do more with less, and Shopping Media provides them the most powerful tools to get more “bang for their buck.” Brands will now be able to have a true one-stop shop for their digital budgets within online retail, and retailers will also be able to add more content that accelerates the conversion cycle with their consumers. By combining search capabilities with our core personalization offerings, we’ve got a 1-2 combo which will be unbeatable! As you might guess, there’s a lot of innovation and integration to do, so we’ll have a lot more to share with our retail and brand partners, in the coming months. We’ve barely scratched the surface for what’s to come in 2012 and beyond—so stay posted. Innovation will be the name of the game for us in 2012. In the meantime, the Searchandise team, now officially part of Team RichRelevance, have made some great contributions to our Holiday Memories Blog – we invite you to partake in their stories and remember what’s most important at this time of the year, and frankly any time of the year: friends and family. We’re thrilled that Searchandise is now part of our family. ” target=”_blank”>our acquisition of Searchandise Commerce. First of all, let me say that we’re thrilled about the combination of our companies. John Federman and his entire team at Searchanside have truly innovated within the Shopping Media industry, and the combination of our capabilities provides an incredible channel of value for both retailers and brands. By joining forces there is simply no company in the marketplace with a more powerful media offering within online retail. We couldn’t be more excited about the success that lies ahead of us.
‘Tis the season! While most of us will be keeping pace with the busiest time of the year, I wanted to take a moment to remind us all why it is we all work so hard to give our customers the best possible shopping experience. For that reason, members of the {rr} team have stepped forward to share their holiday stories — Favorite Holiday Memories — that make up the fabric of what the holiday season really means.
We invite you to take a moment to peruse these stories and re-acquaint yourself with the meaning of sharing, giving and relishing in all we for which we have to be thankful. We would even love to hear your stories, so if you want to join us in the holiday spirit please email your memories to us.
With all of the attention being paid to Occupy Wall Street and the ills of big business, it’s heartening to shine a little light on two new start up’s who are working hard to make the world a better place.
I recently joined the advisory board of these companies—teams of folks with a big vision, unwaveringly commitment to tackling huge problems and these visions are seeing success.
The first is blissmo, founded and led by Sundeep Ahuja (one of my Stanford classmates and a co-founder here at {rr}). blissmo creates consumer products which bring sustainability to a broad audience. They are leveraging social media and new sales methodologies being pioneered by Groupon, Woot! and BirchBox to reduce the complexity of choosing products that are good for you, your family and your world. Already blissmo’s revenue model is working and they are clearly hitting a sweet spot in terms of emerging demand: the right products, the right discovery and the right price. We’re even a customer at {rr}—as soon as we started testing in one of our offices it was such a hit that the other offices immediately asked to participate. Check them out at blissmo.com.