The Exchanges

Q So then maybe you could talk a little bit more about those few weeks. So you had the lunch and you kind of explored a bunch of ideas and said, okay, that's interesting. You were then whiteboarding in those, like, what, what did you actually do to go from the higher order insight to something you would actually ship to someone?

A We worked out kind of the early object model and you know, what we wanted to be able to keep track of. How we wanted to communicate with people and when the important moments were, you know, in a, in a mobile app user journey to be able to create that strong early connection and then ongoing engagement with people. And interestingly enough, the early version of app boy actually was a lot more opinionated and a lot more rigid. We built a number of game mechanics. We built out a user profile. I had cross channel communication from the very beginning because, you know, when you try to solve a more Fundamental problem like that. You realize that actually, unlike a lot of companies that are built to just be, oh, we're going to be a push notification service, or we're going to do email marketing. Like they all start on a single channel. We were just trying to solve a business problem. And so we knew that we needed to be cross channel from the very beginning. So we had four different message types. We had push notifications, email. We had a newsfeed before there was a Facebook newsfeed. I used to call it a mini blog inside your app, but it was it's proper now and was the, the hat boy newsfeed. And then we had our slide up message. We had a user profile. The early version of Appboy actually let the user interact with the profile itself because it was meant to be like a profiling system…

AI assessment note: “We worked out kind of the early object model and you know, what we wanted”

Q Given first principles, thinking is sort of one of those phrases that's sort of thrown around a lot, but not particularly well defined. How did it instantiate itself in those first few years? What's a story of early building that shows kind of what that actually looks like?

A I'll actually use an example from data privacy, which is a landscape that has Really evolved a lot over time. And in the early days of mobile, there were a lot of abuses of, of data privacy because the operating systems didn't really have protection around them. You know, there was a lot of use of hardware identifiers and location data and such that are foreign to today's digital landscape, even as you know, a lot of the, you know, for instance, the ad tech or the, um, analytics world has advanced quite a bit and location data, I think is a good case study in this, because if you just think about yourself as a human, And you think about some of the data that's most valuable to you. Location is close to the top of that list, like where you are in the physical world. You know, so we actually in the early days, we had basic geofencing capability, but there were a lot of companies that were building a lot of kind of insights that are derived from location data. They were building taste graphs and other sorts of trait information that you could kind of harvest and pull in and be able to use that to help target message marketing messaging that was You know, based off of location data that was coming from ad networks and other places, we just felt that because we as humans treat that with such sensitivity that it would be a game of cat and mouse forever and was not one that was worth …

AI assessment note: “I'll actually use an example from data privacy”

Q I want to go back to that first three to nine months when you were getting the company off the ground full time. Did you spend time looking at what other companies were in the space? And did you spend a lot of time with customers or was it more just ideating a little bit removed?

A We didn't have, or we at least didn't perceive direct competitors, uh, necessarily. So there was no competition to look at it. In fact, I couldn't have even told you like what CRM stood for when we started the company comically enough. We also Interestingly, didn't start out building for marketers, which is interesting, but it's just primarily because mobile apps didn't have marketing teams when we first started the company. You know, if you don't have a business model, there's not a lot of reason to try to pour fuel on the fire of your business model. And, you know, along the way, as mobile apps started to mature into businesses and they started to become more sophisticated, the space that we were building for ended up getting owned by marketing and obviously now is helping define what the leading edge of marketing And customer engagement even is, you know, at the time we, we were really building for mobile app developers. The reason that I think developers alone were able to be effective in those early days was because the distribution mechanism of the app store was just so incredible. And so we were definitely working with mobile app developers. We were going to, you know, a lot of mobile app meetups. You know, I had already been in the mobile industry a bit before. And so a lot of great opportunities in my network and community to be able to bounce ideas off of People and r…

AI assessment note: “We didn't have, or we at least didn't perceive direct competitors”

Q What are the most important things that you figured out that if a friend of yours who's really talented is going to start a company you try to impart on them?

A I think the first one is just about commitment and endurance and making sure that the thing that you want to go and build is something that you want to dedicate at least a decade to. I think a lot of people, they Kind of perceive startups as these like great opportunities for like, you know, to be disruptive and build, you know, wealth and what have you, but they also succumb to a lot of the headlines of this or that acquisition happened and it happened, you know, quickly and in the early years of it or whatever. And, and there's a lot of people that I talked to who you just asked them, how long do you think it takes on average for a company to IPO? They grossly underestimate things like that. And so just making sure that there's commitment and conviction and that it's something that they want to dedicate You know, every waking hour to for many years from here on out. And therefore that requires like passion in the space. It requires like conviction. The other big thing that I try to challenge people on is the path of fundraising because everyone also just defaults to go out and raise as much money as we can, like right away and don't really grapple with, you know, the fact that a, there's a lot of businesses that people may start that are not appropriate to be venture backed. And when they go and they try to kind of back them with other investors, they very quickly lose contro…

AI assessment note: “I think the first one is just about commitment and endurance”

Q Bill, maybe we could sort of have you kick it off. And the place I was curious to start is what were you doing in the 12 months before you ended up working to get Braze off the ground?

A Yeah. So I'll actually go back a couple of years because I Graduated from MIT, studied computer science there, and finished my undergrad in 2009. So that was well timed with kind of the early launch of the smartphone industry, early launch of the app stores. And then I moved out to San Francisco and worked at Google and Mountain View for a time. Ended up writing my master's thesis there, but I was working on a visual programming language for building Android applications right at the launch. I remember Cupcake launched that summer, rolled the big fiberglass cupcake out on the lawn of the Android building. Definitely a Really exciting time to be at the ground floor of mobile and the visual programming language we were working on was actually targeted toward education and trying to kind of bring app development to people that were still introductory computer science students. We were working with a number of colleges in their freshman courses to teach computer science, but do so in a way where someone could make something tangibly useful to themselves on a mobile device and do so in a way without a ton of software. And it was really cool to see that come to life because, you know, the idea that you would be able to do that even in a desktop application would require big teams and huge amounts of time. But because mobile was so new and because these devices could interact with the…

AI assessment note: “I moved out to San Francisco and worked at Google and Mountain View”

Q What's the story behind those first few enterprise customers using the product in the way that you wanted in this repeatable fashion?

A So the first enterprise customers, and we had a distinction in the early days between the mobile titans, which were the mobile apps that were growing and scaling quickly. And then there was like the enterprise who were companies that already existed that were then trying to build a mobile presence. We were trying to build for both. We weren't trying to sell the banks in the early days, right? So it wasn't like enterprise with like really heavyweight compliance and security and things like that. It was more like online retailers. And our wedge that we found there was that they already had a business model. They already knew that, you know, if they could engage customers better, they would make more money and they had data driven marketing teams. And, you know, I've commented a lot over the years that one of the really cool things about You know, braze and our evolution and with the market is that we sell to a bunch of job titles that didn't exist when we started the company. And, you know, that's, that's been true for a long time, but that also meant that as this mobile space was emerging, you know, there was also a new way of doing marketing that was emerging at the same time. And so, you know, those early customers on the enterprise side, they were primarily like online retailers. They were places where, you know, they had someone that was, Ambitious. They were leaning into, y…

AI assessment note: “those early customers on the enterprise side, they were primarily like online retailers.”