From Market Match to Customer-Centric with Andre Yee, Foundry

Thanks for joining us today on the Fuel Growth Podcast.

What is the right growth equation for your company? Is it pipeline?

Brand?

Product?

Customers?

Employees?

Join us as we interview CEOs, entrepreneurs and seasoned executives to explore what it takes to propel your business into growth. Welcome to the Fuel Growth Podcast where we explore how to unlock the secrets to sustained revenue growth. Joining us today is Andre Yee, software entrepreneur, previously two times CEO, board member and now the Chief Product Officer of Foundry, a new subsidiary of International Data Group or IDG, a global tech, media, data, research, and marketing services company. Andre, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Clint. Appreciate it. Glad to be on this podcast. And looking forward to our discussion.

We are too, Andre. I want to kick us off actually, Andre. So you started your career as a developer, I understand. You've climbed up the executive ranks to become a thought leader in the marketing software industry. Can you tell us more about your journey to get where you are today?

Sure. Well, my true origin story would have be that I'm an immigrant into a great country. So I actually started here, I actually came to the United States as a student from Malaysia, ended up meeting my wife here and ended up staying here. So I didn't stay for career as much as for love true love, I guess.

Oh, that's a romantic at heart. I love it.

Exactly. So but, you know, I did start as a software engineer, and, you know, loved it. But I found my true sort of calling in leading technology organizations. I just, I love technology. But I also love the people that work in technology. So that was a great combination. And I've had a series of different jobs. And initially just as a software development engineering, manager, then the VP level, and I've been with four companies that have done an IPO in different areas, actually. One was in tax accounting software with a company called Best Software. Another was Landmark Systems, which was a systems management company. And then with a company called SAGA Software. And then probably the most successful was a company called Eloqua. It was, we like to think of ourselves as the pioneer of marketing automation.

I think we all think that as well. Yeah, you guys absolutely were. You created that industry.

Yeah. So we think that we were sort of creating a category. And so that was a great ride. I wasn't a founder, I joined when we sub 15 million ARR. But grew that business over five and a half years, part of the executive team that grew the business from sub 15, to over 100 million in ARR, in five and a half years, took the company public, and we didn't stay out very long as a public company. We ended up being acquired by Oracle for a little less than a billion dollars. So we didn't quite make the unicorn, but we were close. And so it's been a great ride. And then I stayed with Oracle for, you know, I was the Group Vice President of Oracle Marketing Cloud for less than a year really, because I wanted to do the one thing I'd never done in my career, I've been part of companies where I've come in at either five to 10 million in terms of revenue, and then try to get it to over 100 and scale the business. So I've done the scaling. I've done I've even done the turnaround. I've never done sort of from scratch, you know, just the idea. Can you go from zero to ten. And so that was the whole goal with Triblio. And it was a great ride, and we ended up merging and selling to Foundry at the time, it was called IDG Communications. And I am now the Chief Product Officer for Foundry.

Excellent.

That's a great ride along there. And in there you are CEO of Triblio. And you were CEO of another company before that, right?

Yep. Previous to that I was CEO of a company called NFR Security. That was a turnaround. It was a company that had trouble. I joined actually, as the CTO I took over as the CEO, it was my first CEO job. And it was sort of learning being thrown in the deep end of the pool because it was really a company that needed a turnaround. We succesfully turned it around, we did a venture raise, recapitalized the company, and we turned it around and sold it to Checkpoint Software, which is a large firewall and security company. And so that was a good ending, but it also cured me of the desire to do turnarounds. Very, very difficult.

That's where your gray hairs came from. Right?

Exactly, exactly.

Well, I'd like to dig into Triblio a little bit more, because not only is it the company that you were just CEO of, and I believe the company started it in 2013-2014, somewhere around there.

Technically 2014.

Okay. 2014. So, not only is it the company that you've been leading for the past, you know, 6-7-8 years and then sold it to IDG, which, by the way, huge brand, one of the biggest brands out there, IDG, but not necessarily in the software space. So I'd love to, a little bit later, to understand what Foundry is doing in the software space as part of the IDG group. But in there, the part I really liked about the Triblio story is not only did you have to figure out how to drive growth as CEO, but your own products purpose is to help companies grow, right? Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about Triblio and how it helps companies grow.

Yeah, so to give a little context, I started Triblio in 2014. At the time, we had a slide deck and an idea. And we raised about three and a half million dollars and set off on our journey. I say that because we didn't really technically enter the Account Based Marketing space, which is where we ended up. It's like a lot of startups, we started with the wrong idea or not the suboptimal idea, I guess. And we found our way to Account Based Marketing. And so we've been in the Account Based Marketing space since the beginning of 2016. I could spend another podcast just talking about how to how you find your way to product market fit, but I'll just leave that for now, just to say we're leading Account Based Marketing platform. I think one of the unique things about us is we have proprietary intent data built into our platform, which allows you to identify and target accounts with the right buying profile. So we can actually tell you accounts that are showing interest in the market for your particular topic or for your particular product. We also allow you to engage those accounts with cross-channel campaigns. And then finally, we score those accounts and activate your sales team for follow up action. That's in essence, what we do. I think the big picture, I think, when I think of Triblio is we recognize that when you have a CRM, if at your company, you have a CRM, our view is your CRM typically comes empty. And we see it as our job to help you fill that CRM with opportunities, that's sort of the big idea, I guess.

That makes perfect sense to me.

Build up the CRM, that's great. Well, certainly, that's the world I live in, is the CRM world, but you know, I gotta come back to, you kind of brushed past it, but I want to come back to it, if you don't mind, Andre, that moment in 2016, when you guys changed your direction, and you then found the product market fit. If we could just touch on it for a moment, I'm gonna guess that growth was not hitting the goals you're looking for. Probably, that's usually why you do that kind of shift, that pivot, if you will. What was the what was the impetus internally? Was it somebody inside the company who had a new idea and was evangelizing a new idea? Was it a group of you that sat down and looked at the data and said, you know, we need to go a new direction. But that moment of courage to take a hold of your product roadmap and and turn it into a new direction? That's a pretty, pretty cool moment, or a pretty scary moment or a pretty you know, it's got a lot of emotions wrapped. I'd love to hear your version of that story of how it kind of unfolded from, from a courage perspective, if you will.

Cool is not the kind of the word I would use to describe that moment. I wasn't thinking cool. I was thinking, desperation. I think that's actually strangely what what I like about this startup world. I mean, I've done both. I've scaled up company, and I've started companies and I turned them around. But I think what I like about the startup world is, you don't have time to sit around. At least I think if you're a good entrepreneur, you don't have time to sit around and stare at your navel. We weren't achieving our kind of the market traction with the original idea, which I won't go into, for fear of getting off track, but we clearly were not getting market traction. Sales cycles were long. We had to work too hard to convince people to--

Your elevator pitch take three stories?

No, it wasn't even that. I think it was difficult to convince people to buy into what we have, to be honest. And I think, the way I look at it is, I think one of the mistakes I made was misunderstanding. You know, I'm a big believer in Lean Startup, everyone talks about Lean Startup. But one of the things about that was, they say, get the product out and learn quickly, which is absolutely true. But I think what I didn't realize is I thought if someone signs an invoice and says I want to buy it, I viewed that as a product market fit signal. And I think that was where I misunderstood that a little bit. Now, I've now come to believe the number one indicator of product market fit is not revenue, it really isn't revenue, which I think, given that this is a growth podcast might surprise people, it's really not. When in the early stage, it's not revenue, it really is usage. Are people using it? Because what I found is that people will sometimes stroke a check for some interesting new tech, but then a month and a half in, they're not using it. And that's a problem in a SaaS model.

Thanks for sharing that. Andre. I want to switch over to what you mentioned earlier that you've gone through two stages of growth: first, as a standalone company. And then as part of this exciting growth initiative with IDG. As a smaller standalone company, were your vision and values different than today, since you were acquired?

I'd like to think that some of those same values are what we have today. But maybe I should say, as a standalone company, we had a certain set of values, which I would articulate in the following ways, one of which I borrowed from my time at Eloqua. You talk to anyone at Eloqua, they'll definitely say one of the key sort of tenets was get it done. And do it right. And what that means is we're a results, performance based culture. But we also believe strongly in how we get to those results. So it's not just about getting it done, which is great. But it's also doing it in the right way. So I think that get it done, do it right is part of the value that I imported into Triblio when we started the company. But there are all sorts of other elements we added along the way. Another core value that we have is what I might call positive candor. So you've heard there's a lot of, I think there's even a book out there called Radical Candor. And we liked that idea, except that we thought, rather than radical, positive adds a better descriptor in the sense that we want all our employees to be candid about how they feel about their jobs, how during the process, collaboration is very important to be candid to get to the right answer. But we added the descriptor positive because, if possible, we only want you to do it in a positive way. We don't want radical candor to be, which we believe in to be an excuse for just generally bad behavior. And then the last sort of value, I would say, is this ownership mentality we want. We want everyone to act as owners and you know, certainly as a standalone company, we, you know, everyone had stock options. So they had a stake in our success.

Let's switch over to the people side of things. I know that we talked in the past about creating a company culture of growth. So I'd like to understand better about what you've done to build a company culture that supports your growth plans.

I think it was at Eloqua, where I really learned and appreciated how getting the corporate culture right is vitally important for a growth company, any company but particulary a growth company. I would say this though, when people think about culture, sometimes they think about different things. You know, two people can be talking about corporate culture and it can mean different things. You know, for some people, when you say, corporate culture, they're thinking happy hours, they're thinking good ethics with, you know, positive vibes in the office, you know, whatever it is that you may think. And I agree with all of that, I agree, and especially with happy hours. But I think the point I would make specifically to the idea of a culture of growth is that culture has to be connected in a tangible way to the company's core objectives. And for most companies, that part of their core objective is growth, right? And I think that you can have culture, ethics are important, all these are important, but somehow in your culture, you have to have some connective tissue to the idea of growth. If growth is the primary objective, then your culture should sort of speak to that in some way. And that's why, you know, I was saying earlier, I imported from Eloqua, this idea of get it done, which is about performance and cultures, but also doing it right, right. So that's an example of that. So, having said that, I would say a growth culture, I think one of the most important things about growth culture is placing your customer at the center of your identity as a company. You know, you're about serving your customers. At Triblio, one of the things that we realized at some point, not immediately, but as we started to build our business was, we realized we needed to be clear about who we are as a company. In fact, it came about because we felt like our marketing messages weren't resonating. And I spoke to someone, or Chief Marketing Officer at the time, and he says, you know, what, I think I think the reason why a marketing message isn't sticking, is because we're changing it. And the reason we're changing it, is because we're not clear on who we are. Okay, so we got to work on that. And part of where we ended up was that we felt part of our identity is that our mission is about helping marketers help their companies grow. And we put that at the core of our, not only our identity, but then as part of our culture. So there's a real sense of the customer, serving the customer, so that they can be heroes in their organization and growing revenue was really part of our culture. And the other part of our culture, I think the other part of the growth culture is also helping the employees understand the need for positive change. Because along that growth trajectory, you're going to find that roles change, organizational structures change, the way you do things change. And growth brings about change, as an organization we need to be-- Its very nature, it is change. Exactly. So you need to constantly help us all remember, we got to change. And then I think the last part of growth, building a growth culture is, is building a learning culture, right? Growing, is that if you, and that actually starts by hiring people who are naturally curious, and who want to learn, who want to grow professionally and personally. And when you do that, it's amazing when you hire people like that, and you give them the right environment. So it's surprising how that then leads to your company growing. I mean, who would have thought that?

I heard you've already talked about one thing you would have done differently, or one mistake that you made. Are there a couple of other things that you've done, lessons that you've learned around driving growth during your career that you'd be willing to share with us?

You know, mistakes and lessons learned are two sides of the same coin. The greatest lessons you learn come from the biggest mistakes that you make. I think a mistake that early stage founders and CEOs make is they focus a lot on competition, because a lot of ways we're sort of like as business people trained to do that. But I think when you're early stage, especially in a new newer idea, or an emerging idea, I think you want to focus on not so much the competition but where the demand is or the future demand is. So don't focus so much on competition, focus on on the demand, what are customers wanting, what are customers' pain points or as someone wants it to me, even if it's not a current pain point, what are the customers near future pain point? Sometimes they're not aware of it, because it's not been. It's just a dull ache now, but it's gonna get acute in you know, a year and so, this idea of not being obsessed about your competition in the earlier stage, but more around being obsessed about where the demand is, where the customer future pain point might be. The second mistake is more a little further along, I would say. I think eventually that and I would say there's a mistake I made. I think scaling your team means upgrading key positions. And the mistake I would say I made is not doing it earlier. And you know, it's hard. It's a hard thing when you start a company, and people come along, on the journey with you to actually say, You know what, I really need to upgrade this position with someone more experienced.

Well, I gotta tell you, Andre, we have really enjoyed this conversation today. Getting to know you has been just a lot of fun. And frankly, I'm looking forward to bringing you back to Fuel Growth in the future, when you can tell us more about what Foundry is doing right? So exciting. But, you know, as we wrap up here, please go ahead and tell our listeners, where can they find you? Where can they learn more about you and Foundry? Where's where's the right place to go next?

Yeah, sure. I think the easiest thing is to connect with me on LinkedIn. And I think it'd be particularly interesting if they connect with me and just say, you know, they heard the podcast. And, you know, by the way, almost anyone that says that, you know, like, gives them meaningful reason to connect with me, I typically accept it. If they're not explicitly trying to sell me stuff, you know, and just genuinely want to connect, I almost connect with about everyone. I know some people are very exclusive with their LinkedIn and I am not one of those. I'm like, you want to connect with me? And I'll happily connect with you.

I think that just speaks volumes to the type of person you are and the type of leader you are. You're a true inspiration. Andre, I appreciate your time today. And I wish you and the Foundry team, a huge amount of of luck. I don't know that you need a lot of luck, because it sounds like you're on the right path, doing the right things. But with that, I will still wish you luck in the next steps.

Lizzie, thank you so much, Clint, thanks, both of you for having me on on this podcast. Appreciate it.

We appreciate you.