Tech startups begin with a dream about changing the world with a small team of players who share the same vision and are willing to wear many hats. There is a certain vibe and culture that is unique to each startup, and recruiting talent to blend into the mix is very different from larger companies.

Cory Munchbach, VP of Marketing at BlueConic, Inc., joined host Sam Kahane (@Sam_Kahane) on CUBEconversations, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, in the heart of Boston to talk about life working at a startup and the company’s innovative product to help marketers market.

Taking the leap

Munchbach has been with BlueConic for a little over a year. She came from the large, prestigious research firm Forrester Research, Inc. based in Cambridge.  Joining a tech startup, she quickly found herself taking on different roles. She told Kahane about her experiences:

“I’ve been working in a couple different capacities as you might imagine in a startup. I started as our director of product marketing, and now I run our whole marketing organization and dabble in a whole bunch of other things. It’s been kind of a wonderful ride over the last 15 months or so since I started. Definitely a big transition from a big global research company down to a very small, also global, but far more targeted type of company where there’s only 30 of us and we’re all wearing different hats, doing a lot of different things.

“One of the things I talk about with a startup is [how] the intensity is so different. Everything that happens here — good, bad, ugly and otherwise — is just that much more intense by virtue of the fact that there are fewer people working more closely together. And that I love. It’s certainly not for everybody, but it makes every day super awesome as far as I’m concerned. You get to know people better, learn things deeper, get more involved, and that suits me really well.”

BlueConic culture

Munchbach discussed a Friday ritual at the company called “’Building a Dream” sessions, stemming from her first conversation with CEO Bart Heilbron where he sent a text message that said, “We got your papers, but hurry up and get here, we’ve got a dream to build.” The message made her more enthusiastic about the job that, as she said, “Blew her away.”

“When I got here, that really stuck with me and was something I really wanted to carry on, so what we do on Fridays are these ’Building a Dream’ sessions. Every week a new member of the ‘Blue Crew,’ as we call ourselves, gets up and talks for 20 to 30 minutes about themselves, and where they came from, and why they’re here, how they came here, what they like about being part of the company. It’s funny; it started last year, but it’s amazing how it’s evolved … you bring in those different dimensions in; it adds a whole other level of personal commitment and personal investment.

“The Friday sessions are a great way of making sure that you know that person to your left and your right a little bit better and that you build that confidence and that trust in each other so that you can kind of feel like ‘we’ve got a big world to take on,’ and knowing that you’ve got that camaraderie and faith in those people is huge. So that’s been, I think probably, my favorite thing that we’ve done since I started.”

Building a dream

Responding to Kahane’s question, “What is the dream?”, Munchbach explained the goal of creating something to enable today’s marketer to serve the customer more effectively.

“What’s cool about the dream is that we’ve got the company dream and then we’ve got everyone sort of individually underneath it kind of rowing in that direction. We are a Series A, early-stage startup, but actually the product has been around for six years now. We spun out of a company that had been around for a dozen years before that, so we’ve got a lot of history in spite of also being very new.

“The dream was to move the product from the Netherlands to the United States, part one of the dream — so far so good. Build up investors here and build up a product that really changes marketing for today’s modern marketer. … Our ambition is to make sure we’re getting the message out there and making sure that marketers have those tools that they need to be better prepared, and quite frankly, better serve their consumers in what they’re trying to do every day.”

The data dating game

Explaining the product and where it sits on the stack, Munchbach clarified that the company sits on the customer data platform and interacts with various data sources to build a relationship with the customer.

“Our purpose is to essentially take the data that exists from about customers from the web, from your mobile app, from your email, from your CRM, wherever it exists. We collect some of it as well, put it together in a profile that is data and technology agnostic, so you can actually shuttle that data wherever it needs to go. You can recognize those customers when they come to your website or they interact with your email. That’s really important.

“We talk about much more than personalization … [the product is] able to tailor the experience but also anticipate your needs, derive your indentations. It’s kind of like you’re going on a date with someone, in theory, every time you meet that person, every time you go on a date, you know more about them. You don’t ignore what you learned the last time. It’s building up that knowledge but you get that deeper relationship that’s essentially what we are doing for marketing.”

Boston vs. San Francisco

Being a Boston native, Munchbach told Kahane about the transition of South Street, Boston, and how it is the new startup center of the city.

“It’s pretty remarkable to look at that [growth]. We’ve seen not just the growth of the actual innovation district, that physical space, and who’s investing in there and what kind of startups are going there, but also the diversity of them. Boston has always had a really strong technology culture, particularly in health and pharmaceuticals … but I’m excited about companies like ours that you would typically find in Silicon Valley that are taking root here.

“We’re finding peers here and really being able to elevate Boston’s profile for being a place that VCs should be looking at and that they’re going to get their money’s worth. That when they invest with us you have some of the smartest, most capable people in this city and in the surrounding area that are willing to stick around and make those contributions here, as opposed to feeling like they can’t be successful and they have to take their companies or their roles elsewhere. … I think we will continue to see that grow.”

Watch the full video below and learn about the company’s successes and corporate culture.

Photo by SiliconANGLE