M.C.

Good people that work well together is a fundamental necessity in startups. Finding ways for them to grow to keep them together long enough to find success is even more important! One way to do that is to ask unreasonable things of them. The Special Operations group was another place where Endeca could bring in talented folks they didn’t necessarily have a place for yet and keep them busy before reorganizations or strategic repositionings as the company grew. 

Large markets matter. Being bold matters even more. Timing, of course, matters too. The biggest lesson, according to Steve Papa, was a “failure of imagination”. With the right imagination, timing & strategy Endeca could have potentially built an e-commerce business that rivaled the scale of Shopify. But they didn’t see it. And different things are possible at different points in time (and cycles). Maintaining focus through market cycles is also such an important way to learn and build. They built the Endeca platform with eBay as their scale target in terms of product variety, scale of users, throughput, SKUs, etc. A “pile of all the stuff in the world” and a completely unreasonable ask.