Steve Papa was a driving force behind the Endeca experience in the way that he built, challenged, thought and resourced the talented folks that worked for him as the Founder & CEO. These are the bonus learnings John, Steve, Andrew, Vinay & Julie learned from him and one thing he learned from each of them:
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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.
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The context of Endeca at the time, as we’ve highlighted, was the tug of war between being a platform company vs. a vertical application company. In order to raise capital in 2001 to get the company off the ground, they had to pitch a platform and didn’t necessarily have the persuasive arguments for why they should be a vertical application company instead.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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