The Endeca Effect – Overview

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In 2011, Oracle acquired Boston based Endeca for $1.075B. The acquisition ended an 11 year journey spanning the Dot-com bubble, 9/11, the Great Financial Crisis, 3 Super Bowl wins, 2 World Series titles, 1 NBA Championship, 1 Stanley Cup and the punishing drumbeat of technological progress.

There are a bunch of places you can go to read or hear more about the company’s journey over that time period and their core asset, the MDEX engine. Or their second act, a Business Intelligence application, that led them into the arms of Larry Ellison. But this ain’t that kind of story. 

When I moved back to the Boston area last summer and sought to learn about the tech ecosystem I’d grown up around but knew little about, the Endeca name came up repeatedly. Because while the Endeca company journey concluded in 2011, the story of its alumni is still very much being told at local Boston area anchor & growth businesses like Toast, Salsify, Jellyfish, Parallel Wireless and beyond who all have its Kendall Square roots.

One count has Endeca alumni founding 25+ companies and I feel confident in saying that, at the time of this writing, Endeca alumni led companies have a market capitalization >$15B. In the biz they would say that’s a “top decile return” right there.

I was lucky enough to meet Jeff Boehm, an early Endeca Marketing leader, who served from 2002 – 2006. He agreed to collaborate with me on a project for Boston area operators to help unpack what was so unique about the company, time period, and its employees who have gone on to reach great heights. This project would have not happened if it weren’t for Jeff, so we should all thank him for coordinating. Thank you Jeff!!

We sat down with John Andrews (CEO, Celect, Co-Founder and CEO, Cimulate), Steve Fredette (Co-Founder & President, Toast), Andrew Lau (Co-Founder & CEO, Jellyfish), Vinay Mohta (Co-Founder of Kyruus & CEO, Manifold), Julie Yoo (Co-Founder of Kyruus & GP @ a16z) and Steve Papa (Endeca Founder & CEO) to help answer the following questions and share with the Boston tech ecosystem what was it that made the Endeca experience such a special part of their careers:

  • What was it about Endeca that bred so many startups and entrepreneurs? Is there an “Endeca Effect” or was it a series of coincidences?
  • What lessons did you learn about people, markets & products that carried through your career to today?
  • What overall “career learnings” did you learn from the Endeca experience that you would tell up & coming operators today?
  • What’s the most memorable thing Steve Papa, Endeca Co-Founder & CEO, taught you? And what did Steve learn from them?

Let’s also go ahead and save you the drama. Startups are hard. There’s no magic to this stuff. The Endeca folks were intelligent, hardworking, found a great market, and stuck together to see the mission through. If it was anything, maybe one thing? It was the people. Led by a bold, inspiring, no frills leader – Steve Papa. These are their learnings:

  • Unreasonable Things – Steve Papa, the management team, and the early leadership team asked people to do unreasonable things. The people that signed up to work on those hard problems and stuck with it had a unique set of experiences, recruited like minded colleagues, and were forged by the experience
  • Context & Timing – Endeca was constrained by the context of their time. They couldn’t raise money to build an application company because investors thought the e-commerce market was too small and uninteresting at the time. They had to build a platform in order to secure funding and people joined the team to build that platform company. There was a ton of valuable experience gained within the context of building horizontal & vertical platform strategies at an enterprise software company through multiple market cycles on the eve of the cloud revolution
  • Power Functions & Special Ops – Many of Endeca’s most successful entrepreneurial alumni came from the “power functions” of Product & Sales. Specifically, many of them served on Endeca’s “Special Operations” team, which gave them exposure to the entrepreneurial game. This team sat outside of the core org chart and would go out to the field with prototypes, meet with customers, solicit feedback, and return to tweak their learnings to seed future product development. There, they obtained the “grit” of trying, failing, and trying again to bring new product prototypes to market over and over again
  • See It To Believe It – during our conversations everyone referenced the value of seeing “what good looks like” or the first person perspective of experiencing product market fit as it was occurring [really experience “listening” to the customer]. Having that personal, up close experience early in your career as a reference point was supremely valuable when they later went off to start new companies, launch new products, etc.
  • Validated Network – The network is a huge part of it. You can’t always see that at the beginning or even while you’re in the middle of it but a group that went through something meaningful and then were able to achieve a successful outcome were rewarded with capital, experience, talented colleagues and validation from their peers in the market

Over the next 10 days we will unpack what these Endeca alumni learned about Markets, People, & Products and what they would tell up and coming operators about their career. These are their lessons, repackaged with a rose colored tint as a gift to all the operators in the trenches building the next anchor technology businesses of our era in this great championship city of Boston. Thank you all for your time. Let’s get to it!

KEY:

  • J.A. = John Andrews, Director Strategic Marketing > VP, Marketing & Product (2004-2012)
  • S.F. = Steve Fredette, Software Engineer > Sales Engineer > Manager, Special Operations > Manager, Development (2005-2012)
  • A.L. = Andrew Lau, Engineer > Professional Services > VP Engineering (1999-2008)
  • V.M. = Vinay Mohta, Software Architect & Developer > New Market Development (2000-2006)
  • J.Y. = Julie Yoo, Software Engineer > Professional Services > Sales Engineer (2001-2006) 
  • S.P. = Steve Papa, Co-Founder & CEO (1999-2011)

Series Outline:

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