The Endeca Effect - Career Insights + Conclusion

Startups are hard. Aside from some outliers, it’s hard to do unreasonable things and it’s a lot of work. All the Endeca employees were forged through this difficult but rewarding experience. If you sign up for the work, you need to be committed to it. It’s not a normal job. In the current era “there’s a lot of people who try to argue there should be more entrepreneurs. But it’s like being a professional athlete without training” says Steve Papa.

Here are the career learnings they would tell up & coming operators today:

Serving the Time
The best decision I made in my career was joining Endeca. Everything else flowed from that. One time I even tried to resign after someone was hired over me and Steve Papa, on Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend, spent 3 hours with me and said “John, you’re not leaving”. Endeca had 400 people at the time! I tried to explain that I was at peace with my decision and me staying would mean a few things and Steve said he was going to do all of that for me and an additional thing. The second best decision I made in my career was staying. When we were acquired I was the most senior person left standing in the commerce business and got to own the Commerce product at Oracle. (J.A.)

I tell people when I speak at universities how valuable it is to have gotten six to seven years of work experience out of school before we started Toast. Learning to be a manager, spending time in sales, engineering, marketing, etc. Intrapreneur type stuff — launching new products, taking them to market, doing training & enablement working across teams. I got to work with Chris Comparato, Toast’s current CEO, taking prototypes we built and deploying it to customers and dealing with all the issues — customer support & the whole lifecycle. You learn a lot of basic skills learning about the lifecycle of products, “what good looks like” and what a high growth company looks like. (S.F.)

I got to experience the early days, finding PMF, and then getting to scale. Through those chapters I learned you need a different organizational strategy at each of those phases. The people who were there at the beginning got to see the magic of being an “athlete” on the front lines, representing the company well and getting shit done. There was a major emphasis on technical competence in the beginning. We had very little overhead, just a clear articulation of the problem space and then a mandate for engineering to go “figure it out”. It was a tech first approach in the early days (J.Y.)

It’s hard work. If you sign up for the work, you need to be committed to it. It’s not a normal job. In the current era “there’s a lot of people who try to argue there should be more entrepreneurs. But it’s like being a professional athlete without committing to the training” (S.P.)

Giving Back
I like to joke that I gave 10 years of my life to Steve Papa but, ever since, Steve has been giving it back. Steve was the one who introduced me to the co-founders of Celect with a simple intro e-mail and that was it. I joined them as CEO and after 5 years we sold the company to Nike. I’m still meeting with a bunch of Endeca folks to help guide my career. The secret is to get in with a community that you can grow with and leverage for the rest of your career. There’s kind of an unwritten rule that if someone from Endeca asks for help, you help them. It’s so important to have a professional network that you feel like you accomplished something special together with. We’ll always have that bond. We all appreciate each other and what we did together. Even those who weren’t there for a long time still feel a part of that community. I’m always trying to figure out how I can replicate the good things we had from a community standpoint at Endeca (J.A.)

How culture matters & people matter. People looked after me at Endeca. Dave Gourley & Phil Braden taught me, as a young professional, how to be a professional – even how to clean myself up, speak, and dress for customer meetings! Early on, I was tapped to work on services and later brought back to Engineering. Then I was encouraged to go into management. The company was always willing to give me chances to grow. I will always really be grateful that they let and pushed me to do more. (A.L.)

I think there’s something to be said for Endeca creating a diaspora of Founding class faster than a company that IPOs. Endeca being acquired was a bit more abrupt and there was an exodus of people, especially for those who wanted to be Founders. It might have been a slower thing for a company like HubSpot because that type of “turning the page” happened slower after an IPO. How many of the Endeca entrepreneurs did Steve [Papa] personally help? That is probably unique. An entrepreneur who IPO’d perhaps can’t invest the time and resources. Most Founders don’t choose to use all their success and invest it back into the startup ecosystem. Steve [Papa] was a supporter of entrepreneurship and I think that had a big effect on the next era. (S.F.)

What Great Looks Like
I learned the shrewdness and intensity with which you need to approach company building. I learned how to be a critical product decision maker, leveraging “product grit”. Learning the patterns on the art of using professional services – picking and choosing who you listen to – in order to refine a good product experience. Also, experiencing the taste of success. There’s a certain buzz when people use what you make, and once you experience it, you seek it. That instinctual art of experiencing momentum is so valuable early in your career. I learned what “good people” means. People that are collaborative, that inspire you, and how to treat each other. It was really meaningful. I learned how to manage from Keith Johnson, an amazing people leader. I watched these people and patterned myself after their example. (A.L.)

There were many product initiatives that faltered but a tremendous amount of pull other times. If you don’t know what great looks like, that can be a lot harder to replicate. I think it definitely increased our chances of being successful when we started Toast. We got to work closely with Steve Papa and see how he thought. We modeled the company after our Endeca learnings when you could “feel” product market fit from the response you get from customers. Knowing what that feels like and seeing what a high growth company looks like, with all its internal challenges, was so helpful. At Endeca we used to talk about when we double headcount the things that are working today won’t work in the future. And how to plan for that. (S.F.)

I really valued the time I spent in the field working with world class Enterprise Sales reps. With our Business Intelligence product we spent almost a year pounding the pavement with reps going to meetings and not enough operators value sales experience. Knowing what large scale Enterprise software sales looked like has served me so well in my career. Also, working on “hard tech” as an engineer is really helpful to then inform some of the complexities of why products are hard to build. It’s helpful to know some of the complexities involved and what tradeoffs do we want to make? Endeca having a product that was technically hard was pretty valuable later in my career. (V.M.)

But…Don’t Waste Your Time
High growth environments allow you to see lots of people, patterns, and higher frequency repetition allows a breeding ground for you to learn stuff. If you don’t know what you want to do, go do things that interest you and find people that you can learn from. (A.L.)

Be super picky about the people you work with. Life is too short. I was so lucky to work at Endeca early in my career. I had no idea until much later. (J.Y.)

Finally, a quick story. In the early Endeca days there was this trivia company called the Urban Challenge. They organized scavenger hunts of sorts across different cities. You would form teams, get 7 questions that were like riddles with clues, and try to answer them by running to the right place in the city to take a picture in front of the answer. The first to arrive scored the most points, and so on down. The first year the Urban Challenge came to Boston, Endeca employees formed teams to compete and enjoyed the experience. It was something to do, team building, you know the drill.

The next year? They set up a command center where Endeca teams could call in from the field to their counterparts back in a room with modems hooked up to triage and solve the puzzles fastest. Boston’s Urban Challenge leaderboard looked like an Endeca billboard. Endecans went on to compete nationally in New Orleans and Las Vegas over the coming years. The Urban Challenge organizers even had to change the rules of the competition due to the innovative tactics Endeca had cooked up.

I think that’s a great microcosm of what made Endeca special. A clever, mischievous, and fun loving group who enjoyed competing, innovating & winning. If you’re looking for a great startup to join and grow your career with, I hope you can find something similar. Because if you can’t win with friends, why do it at all?

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:

The Endeca Effect – Career Insights + Conclusion

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