For these game changers, vision is only the beginning
EY has long celebrated the entrepreneurial spirit of men and women who have followed and achieved their dreams. Over almost three decades, we have applauded their commitment to innovation and perseverance in the face of enormous risk. They saw a different future and made it happen.
The EY Entrepreneur Of The Year® Program provides an enduring legacy to these dynamic leaders, recognizing their vision and impact. By uniting them in a lasting network of peers who thrive where so many others have failed, we have helped to build an influential community of innovative entrepreneurs.
Each June, we host celebrations in 25 U.S. cities to toast the vision and impact of the men and women who are regional finalists. These leaders have changed the lives of countless others by building their businesses and giving back to their communities.
Join us in celebrating their passion, innovation and tireless pursuit of business excellence.
Congratulations to all our finalists! ●
Ernie Cortes
program director
EY Entrepreneur Of The Year®
Northern California
2015 Entrepreneur Of The Year Northern California
Quick links:
CLOUD SERVICES Keith Krach, DocuSign, Inc. | Dylan Smith, Box | Suhail Doshi, Mixpanel EMERGING Dheeraj Pandey, Nutanix, Inc. | Rob Bearden, Hortonworks, Inc. | Todd McKinnon, Okta HEALTH AND LIFE SCIENCES Jean-Jacques Bienaimé, BioMarin Pharmaceutical | James Schoeneck, Depomed, Inc. | Edward Lanphier, Sangamo BioSciences Inc. NETWORKING Jayshree Ullal and Andy Bechtolsheim, Arista Networks | David Ulevitch, OpenDNS | Selena Lo, Ruckus Wireless RETAIL AND CONSUMER PRODUCTS John Foraker, Annie’s, Inc.| Thomas Harman, Balsam Brands | Richard Norgrove, Bear Republic Brewing Company SERVICES Kenneth Lin, Credit Karma | Kathy Johnson, Ph. D., Home Care Assistance | Mary C. Kariotis, Merrimak Capital Company, LLC SOFTWARE Marcus Ryu, Guidewire Software Inc. | Jyoti Bansal, AppDynamics | Kirk Krappe, Apttus TECHNOLOGY Paul Nahi, Enphase Energy | Conor Madigan, Ph. D., Kateeva | Peter Arvai, Prezi
2015 Entrepreneurs Of The Year
CLOUD SERVICES, Award Recipent
Keith Krach
chairman and CEO
DocuSign, Inc.
www.docusign.com
When Keith Krach joined DocuSign, Inc. in 2009 as chairman, the company had about 50 employees and focused primarily on developing an eSignature platform for real estate transactions. But Krach, the co-founder of Ariba Network and Rasba Corp., quickly recognized the opportunities were much greater than this single vertical market.
He evaluated the existing leadership structure and instilled a new sense of direction focused on three major areas — talent, vision and mission.
First, he built a high-performing team. This included assuming the additional role of CEO. Today, Krach spends about 30 percent of his time focused on talent acquisition and fostering a culture of teamwork and accountability. Krach also understood that part of that included fostering a culture where giving back to the community was important.
Next, he created a clear vision to communicate to employees the future of the company: To transform the business world in how transactions are managed.
Finally, Krach created a new mission for DocuSign that was much broader than its initial focus: Develop and enable a platform where any confidential documents — not just real estate transactions — could be signed and transacted securely at any time on any device. He believed this could change the status quo of business transactions through a signature on a sheet of paper.
Convincing the public to adapt DocuSign’s solution was the biggest challenge Krach faced. But when he partnered with Salesforce.com to use DocuSign to transact test deals, the leadership team at Salesforce was so impressed that they invested financially and integrated the solution across its client base.
That move provided the spark Krach needed to reach a mass market, and today DocuSign serves more than 100,000 enterprise clients worldwide and more than 50 million individual users. ●
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CLOUD SERVICES, Finalist
Dylan Smith
co-founder and CFO
Box
www.box.com
Dylan Smith, co-founder and CFO of Box, found his entrepreneurial spirit early. In high school, he started a tutoring service, and at Duke University, schoolwork took a back seat to starting new ventures like launching a loft-building business selling to incoming freshmen.
In Smith’s sophomore year at Duke, he and co-founder Aaron Levie, CEO, identified an opportunity in the online storage and sharing space, where there were few compelling options.
Box was the first company to syndicate files — file sharing across a server where the user can determine how the content is shared. They promoted their business via tech blogs and captured the attention of Mark Cuban, who ultimately offered them their first funding.
During the economic downturn, Smith was faced with not only having to lay off employees, but friends.
In 2011, Citrix sought to acquire Box, but Smith lead the charge to convince the board that Box had only scratched the surface of its potential.
As Box continued to move toward the vision of becoming a public company, Smith believed the company might need a more experienced CFO. As a testament to his value and the trust he had built, based on the feedback from investors, banks and Box individuals, the board voted to have Smith be the leader to get Box in a position for an IPO.
Box went public on Jan. 23, 2015, with Smith as the 29-year-old CFO.
As the company has grown, Smith has transitioned from being a player-coach to a leader-coach. He is focused on upgrading his team and removing obstacles.
Box places a premium on hiring and retaining top talent. Smith believes that having a top-level recruiter within the first 10 employees of a new company is key to building out a high performing workforce. ●
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CLOUD SERVICES, Finalist
Suhail Doshi
CEO
Mixpanel
www.mixpanel.com
Mixpanel, founded in 2009 by CEO Suhail Doshi, has played a role in defining the market for analytics tools focused on mobile user behavior. It’s helping businesses grow by providing them with deep insights into user behavior and marketing effectiveness that trumps common metrics such as page views and downloads, which often fall short of gauging user engagement and can be misleading. Mixpanel’s analytics enables customers to make data-driven and data-informed decisions about their business and products by providing customers with useful metrics that equate to engagement.
Focusing solely on analytics, with particular attention paid to mobile since its inception, most of Mixpanels’s revenue has been generated through inbound sales leads as the company has forgone an outbound salesforce and does very little marketing. The company, with its 3,000 paying customers and analysis of over 43 billion data points and profiles every month, expects its revenue trajectory to continue and significantly increase in 2015.
Doshi is considered a charismatic and passionate leader who is driven and persistent in his efforts to accomplish Mixpanel’s goals. He spends a considerable amount of time recruiting top talent and on-boarding them to help the company scale and achieve its vision. Within the last year, Doshi hired a chief revenue officer from another fast-growing, Bay Area technology company. He has also recently hired vice presidents in critical areas of the company’s business, including in customer success and finance. Candidates are attracted to Mixpanel’s story and vision, and they stay because of the company’s close-knit culture.
While Doshi expects the company will continue to face difficulties because some of its competitors are of a much larger scale, he embraces these challenges and is focused on innovating Mixpanel’s current products and moving into new areas. ●
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EMERGING, Award Recipient
Dheeraj Pandey
president and CEO
Nutanix, Inc.
www.nutanix.com
Nutanix, Inc., headed by President and CEO Dheeraj Pandey, builds simple, powerful and flexible data centers for customers, allowing them to start with a few servers and scale to thousands.
Redefining the data center infrastructure and virtualization market is central to Pandey’s mission. He and his co-founders recognized that developers were moving to democratic infrastructures rather than monolithic boxes that can be expensive to procure and difficult to provision. Seeing this trend, Pandey tried to move his former company into the hyperconverged market, but met resistance. He then convinced his co-founders to quit their jobs and formed Nutanix in 2009.
Nutanix‘s simplified data center infrastructure uses integrated server and storage resources to form a turnkey appliance that is deployed quickly and runs any application at any scale. While the software solution is complex, its consumer-grade user interface is easy to use.
Significant barriers to entry have existed in the market. But accommodating customers’ current commitments to hardware providers and dated solutions allows Nutanix to make a value proposition that can be difficult to compete against.
After shipping its first Virtual Computing Platform in 2011, Nutanix now owns 52 percent of the rapidly growing hyperconverged infrastructure market. The product’s value to customers has also increased, as seen by its Net Promoter Score, which has grown from 72 just a couple of years ago to its most recent score of 88.
The company’s success can be attributed not only to disruptive technology, but also to its innovation in distribution strategy. It goes to market by leveraging value-added resellers, service providers and technology consultants. In addition, it has a relationship with original equipment manufacturers such as Dell to sell Nutanix software on its hardware. The strategy is an example of how Nutanix ensures the product experience is as strong as possible, while at the same time significantly accelerating its adoption. ●
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EMERGING, Finalist
Rob Bearden
chairman and CEO
Hortonworks, Inc.
www.hortonworks.com
When Rob Bearden joined Hortonworks, Inc., a publicly traded open source software company, he set out to equip enterprise organizations with a means to tackle their big data challenges and seize opportunities. Bearden, chairman and CEO, recognized that in today’s world data management could not architecturally or financially be captured, stored, processed and analyzed in the same way that legacy transactional data had been. The legacy software model was insufficient for keeping up with the growing data management demands.
To solve these challenges, a fundamentally new architectural approach was required. His vision was subscription-based open source software where customers can customize their IT infrastructure. He believed that enterprises needed to transform their business model from being reactive to their customers post-transaction to being interactive with customers pre-transaction, which required a new way to manage and integrate different forms of data including social media, click stream, Web logs, financial transactions, videos and machine sensor data. Apache Hadoop became the framework that would solve this problem.
His initiative was started at a time where Hadoop was not accepted commercially as an enterprise-grade platform. So while Bearden realized the value Hadoop could bring to enterprise organizations, he knew he couldn’t do it alone. He identified the key founders/architects of Hadoop inside Yahoo!, and convinced Yahoo!’s co-founder, Jerry Yang, that the optimal approach was to spinoff more than 20 of Yahoo!’s core Hadoop engineers and create the only 100 percent open source Hadoop software company focused on enterprise customers.
Four years later, Hortonworks’ Hadoop platform has enabled leading enterprise organizations to leverage their data assets and become more agile, efficient and ultimately more proactive with their customers. The company successfully completed its IPO in December 2014, and is adding more new customers per quarter than any other Hadoop company. ●
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EMERGING, finalist
Todd McKinnon
co-founder and CEO
Okta
www.okta.com
With the motto, “Wildly successful customers lead to a wildly successful Okta,” Todd McKinnon, CEO and co-founder of the integrated identity management service, met with hundreds of CIOs to better understand their challenges with well-established identity management vendors. He discovered those vendors could not deliver solutions designed for cloud and mobile technologies, so he built a cloud-based service that addressed these concerns.
The former head of engineering at Salesforce.com witnessed the initial emergence of the cloud application market while overseeing the teams that focused on cloud applications. He also saw the lack of existing competition and left his position at Salesforce with a mockup and business plan to make his way in the market of cloud identity management, a market that at the time didn’t exist.
Analysts and market experts told McKinnon the venture was foolish, but he had the foresight to see that he could take what was traditionally on-site infrastructure and identity management and offer it as a service as if it were a business application. Competition began to arise, which was hugely positive as it legitimized his vision of cloud-based identity management. Okta could now move away from a focus on proving its value towards maximizing its potential.
As CEO, McKinnon focused first on providing an end-to-end solution that has coverage over any service a customer wants to deploy and manage on its platform. He then worked to provide the highest number and most in-depth integrations, which it achieved through its growing partner base of companies that include Adobe, ServiceNow and Advent, which are fully integrating Okta into their products. Finally, Okta focused on making its customers highly successful. To this end, Okta reaches for the highest level of customer service to garner the trust of customers and ensure the full potential of its products are being realized. ●
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HEALTH AND LIFE SCIENCES, Award Recipient
Jean-Jacques Bienaimé
chairman and CEO
BioMarin Pharmaceutical
www.biomarin.com
After Jean-Jacques Bienaimé joined BioMarin Pharmaceutical as chairman and CEO in 2005, BioMarin brought four of its five products for patients with rare genetic diseases to market. Every product under Bienaimé’s leadership has been approved in the U.S., Europe and beyond.
The company has been able to get drugs to market in less than five years by focusing on very severe disorders. This is significantly faster than the industry standard, and has been done at a fraction of the cost for most biopharmaceutical products.
It was a tumultuous time when Bienaimé joined BioMarin. There was a proxy fight to replace three of the board of directors, BioMarin was running out of cash and the company’s stock was performing poorly.
The outlook was grim, but Bienaimé believed the business just needed better management.
Bienaimé let go of the entire commercial organization that at the time made up one-third of the company, hired a chief commercial officer so the chief medical officer could focus on clinical development and terminated many stalled R&D programs.
Although BioMarin had no international operations, Bienaimé convinced the board to fight to keep the worldwide rights to Naglazyme, the first drug he helped launch. Today, 85 percent of the sales of Naglazyme, the company’s biggest selling product, come from outside the U.S.
Within that first year, Bienaimé oversaw the corporate reorganization, Naglazyme’s launch and a round of equity financing.
The company is built on delivering products that have a large impact on a small patient population, the opposite of most big pharmaceutical companies. Bienaimé has a keen sense of which molecules have long-term potential, allowing the company to streamline development efforts.
Today, BioMarin has a pipeline with 10 products in clinical development, and two to three of those products are expected to gain regulatory approval in the next few years. ●
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HEALTH AND LIFE SCIENCES,Finalist
James Schoeneck
president and CEO
Depomed, Inc.
www.depomed.com
James Schoeneck hit the ground running when he took over as president and CEO at Depomed, Inc., a company that needed to change its ways in a hurry from focusing on research and development to becoming a commercial pharmaceutical business.
Schoeneck set an aggressive five-year goal that represented a significant shift in strategy. Though not all board members supported the new direction initially, Schoeneck’s leadership and charisma sparked a fire in Depomed employees. The opportunities he could see in the company began to come to fruition.
He speaks with admiration and respect for the legal team Depomed has developed and the unbelievably challenging trials faced by the sales and marketing leaders. Schoeneck measures success by more than just financial growth.
He pushes the company to meet strategic goals, grow its expertise in the field and ensure long-term plans are in place instead of short-term financial gain.
Schoeneck’s leadership style is exemplified by a conversation he had with a sales consultant who was preparing to leave the company. They talked philosophy, and hashed out goals and the framework of a corporate culture that they wanted to see. They also thought about components that would breed success and foster growth in the business.
In the end, Schoeneck convinced the man, who ultimately become the vice president of sales, to stay.
Schoeneck thrives where others struggle to see the path.
When he arrived at Depomed, the company had only one product, Glumetza, which brought in minimal royalty income. A lot of companies in a similar situation might buy a drug, increase the price and then resell it for the short-term benefit.
Schoeneck demonstrated a different approach that can be tied back to the company’s belief in adding value to the health care marketplace. The company actually grows its products, focusing on operations and not just looking for pure financial gain. ●
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HEALTH AND LIFE SCIENCES, Finalist
Edward Lanphier
president and CEO
Sangamo BioSciences, Inc.
www.sangamo.com
Edward Lanphier, president and CEO of Sangamo BioSciences, Inc., has a vision for engineering cures for debilitating and often fatal diseases. The potential cures are being engineered at the microscopic level through genome editing and gene therapy. If successful, these cures could replace current treatments for these diseases, which rely on a lifetime of enzyme replacement therapy.
Sangamo’s approach to gene therapy involves the use of zinc finger DNA binding proteins to re-engineer a gene. The ZFPs act as a switch for gene regulation, which allows a specific area within a gene to be targeted and replaced with a ZFP. When those altered genes replicate they pass on the change provided by the ZFP, correcting any mistakes in them that otherwise would have given rise to various diseases. Sangamo has incorporated the delivery methods used in cell therapy with a new process of engineering ZFPs to directly target specific areas of genes and modify them without altering other areas of the gene.
Replicating the protected genotype of people who are immune to HIV/AIDS, Sangamo has put the beneficial immunity into people infected with HIV through ZFPs. Sangamo achieved very favorable results in its phase one clinical testing and is now in phase two.
The company’s pharmaceutical partnerships include Biogen Idec and Shire International GmbH, with which Sangamo is developing potentially curative treatments for beta thalassemia, sickle cell disease, hemophilia, Huntington’s disease and other genetic diseases. Multiple delivery methods for precisely targeting a genetic defect are being studied for various diseases, with a focus on commercial and medical utility.
Lanphier’s financial leadership has resulted in the company maintaining a strong balance sheet over its 20 years of existence. Sangamo has executed a diversified business model of out-licensing noncore assets, strategic industry collaborations and proprietary programs designed to maximize the value of the ZFP platform. ●
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NETWORKING, Award Recipient
Jayshree Ullal
president and CEO
Andy Bechtolsheim
founder, chief development officer and chairman
Arista Networks
www.arista.com
Andy Bechtolsheim is no stranger to the high-tech world. As the founder of Sun Microsystems, Granite Systems and Kealia, Bechtolsheim’s Arista Networks benefits from his keen understanding of what it takes to succeed in today’s Silicon Valley climate: an autonomous and nimble organization that can quickly adapt to effectively compete against well-established industry giants like Cisco Systems.
Bechtolsheim co-founded Arista Networks with David Cheriton in 2004. The company provides networking solutions, and the pair financed the business primarily with their own money.
The financial structure allowed them to spend the company’s early years making their own decisions on growth initiatives without worrying about any outside capital oversight.
This philosophy led to the development of Arista’s signature product, Arista Extensible Operating System — considered by many to be the most programmable networking software stack on the market.
In 2008, Bechtolsheim made another critical decision: He hired Jayshree Ullal as Arista’s president and CEO, allowing him to think solely about improving the company’s solutions.
Under Ullal’s direction, the company evolved quickly. She guided Arista to early profitability, massive growth and an IPO in 2014 — infusing new cash into the company as it continued its global expansion.
As Arista grows in the fiercely competitive cloud networking market, Ullal remains steadfast in her belief about what matters most at Arista — dedicated and innovative employees. She views talent acquisition as the most important ingredient, and one of the biggest potential obstacles to the company’s continued success.
To that end, she puts a premium on culture and ensures that the traits Bechtolsheim, who serves as chief development officer and chairman, established when he founded Arista continue well into the future — an entrepreneurial environment and a creative mindset that results in innovation and a competitive spirit. ●
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NETWORKING, Finalist
David Ulevitch
founder and CEO
OpenDNS
www.opendns.com
David Ulevitch, founder and CEO of the network security and delivered network security services company OpenDNS, began his Internet career early in life. Before entering high school, Ulevitch worked for a regional Internet service provider. Later, he worked at MP3.com, starting as an intern and eventually working in the content development department during the company’s explosive growth period between 1999 and 2000.
Ulevitch learned about technical support, programming and system administration as well as dealing with customer relations and the hiring process. Most important, he learned that the bad guys need to know only one way to get into an organization’s computer, but the good guys have to know all the ways to stop them.
During his freshman year at Washington University in St. Louis, Ulevitch started EveryDNS to fill the need for Web-based DNS management and help people with domain names. To generate revenue, he set up a donation mechanism on the company’s website. EveryDNS grew from a personal project to a service with nearly 100,000 users worldwide. By the time Ulevitch finished college, EveryDNS was supporting him financially.
Today, OpenDNS offers the largest cloud-DNS service in the world. It delivers predictive security that blocks malware, botnets and phishing threats on any device and detects targeted attacks. Using big data, natural language processing and machine learning techniques, OpenDNS identifies attacks in their formative stages and blocks threats before they impact customers. The company‘s predictive threat intelligence anticipates and blocks attacks before they impact customers, and its unique security platform enables customers to seamlessly integrate threat intelligence from multiple vendors and then use that information to automatically protect users outside the corporate network.
The engineering team at OpenDNS continues to deliver the safest Internet experience possible for its more than 10,000 enterprise customers, including many of the Fortune 50, and each of its 60 million users. ●
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NETWORKING, Finalist
Selina Lo
president and CEO
Ruckus Wireless
www.ruckuswireless.com
When Selina Lo reviewed the early stage business plan for Ruckus Wireless, she immediately told the founders that they were heading down a path with significant competition, shrinking margins and limited scale. She suggested a change of direction to enterprise Wi-Fi instead of consumer Wi-Fi. She argued that enterprise IT managers often did not fully understand the technology, which led to critical business problems with stability and user consistency. Her ability to recognize a demand that Ruckus could fill changed the path of the company that she came to lead as president and CEO. The supplier of advanced wireless systems for the mobile Internet infrastructure market now has over 48,000 end-customers worldwide and the enterprise market estimated to grow around 20 percent annually.
Innovation has been a large part of the foundation of Lo’s success. She has been able to identify an unseen purpose, and even repurpose products and ideas that don’t appear to have strong market potential. Pairing this with her knowledge of the industry and markets has helped mitigate the risk associated with such change.
While some firms differentiate themselves by being the largest in their market, Ruckus strives to be the last company standing in its industry. The company’s customer-focused strategy realized through its proven response time and personalized client service can be seen as its biggest competitive advantage. Ruckus has learned about its consumers and grown by meeting their changing needs.
Similarly, Lo has made a successful career out of her ability to continually learn and grow from her experiences. She remains humble in the face of the many challenges of being a leader. Recognizing her own limitations, she accepts that no one is perfect and takes the necessary steps to fill in the gaps where needed. ●
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RETAIL AND CONSUMER PRODUCTS, Award Recipient
John Foraker
CEO
Annie’s, Inc.
www.annies.com
When John Foraker joined Annie’s, Inc. in 1998, he saw much more than an organic mac and cheese company — he saw an opportunity to develop a mainstream brand that could flourish through unique connections with consumers.
Foraker’s vision was to infuse a personal touch into the brand — that of a mother’s love for and connection with her children.
At the time, Annie’s was a small yet growing company trying to find its way. Its products were regulated to the natural food and organic aisle, a product placement decision by retailers, which limited growth potential. Foraker, CEO, recognized that if he could effectively change consumers’ attitudes and create a bond between them and the company, he could pitch a new message to retailers and convince them to shift Annie’s products to the main aisles.
His plan worked, and over the next few years, retailers started looking at Annie’s differently. They moved the company’s growing product line to the main aisles, which sparked significant growth.
Foraker’s efforts led to unexpected consequences: Because retailers suddenly saw organic food through a different lens, the shift in product placement signaled the transition of organic foods from a niche product to a more mainstream consumer category — and Annie’s was leading the way.
This attracted the attention of Solera Capital, which in 2002 acquired a controlling interest in Annie’s. With a cash infusion, Annie’s went into hypergrowth mode. Then, in 2012, after a decade of expansion, Foraker took the company public. Two years later, after two more stellar years of growth, General Mills acquired the company for nearly three times per share more than its IPO price.
Today, Annie’s is a standalone division of General Mills, and Foraker continues to find new ways for Annie’s to innovate and foster its strong bond with consumers. ●
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RETAIL AND CONSUMER PRODUCTS, Finalist
John Harman
founder and CEO
Balsam Brands
www.balsambrands.com
Few people have the wherewithal — or constitution — to dream up, organize and go to market with an idea in just four months. Fewer still are willing to bet the house on their ability to succeed. But that’s what Thomas Harman did in 2006 when he founded Balsam Brands.
In March, Harman, CEO, decided he wanted to create ultra-realistic artificial Christmas trees and retail the products exclusively online. In June, he flew to China to design and order the company’s first collection of trees, partnered with a third-party distribution network, established a customer service center and launched the company’s website.
By mid-January 2007, Harman’s idea had become a viable business: He had sold thousands of trees, been featured in national publications and became profitable — all before realistic artificial trees were popular and without any experience in décor, design or online retail.
But Harman wasn’t interested in becoming the next big fad. He wanted to create a sustainable business model that could flex and grow. His goal was to establish Balsam Brands as a national brand, using the Internet effectively to amplify the company’s marketing efforts and contain its hard costs.
He spent the next several years designing and patenting new types of Christmas trees, benchmarking competitors and traveling the globe in search of new inspiration. Harman invested in dynamic consumer website experiences and sophisticated branding. He also developed a flexible staffing model by co-founding an independent third-party customer service company that seasonally scales the team serving Balsam from 10 to more than 200.
Today, Harman’s vision has expanded well beyond trees. Balsam has become the go-to retailer of holiday décor and entertaining products, such as tree skirts, ornaments, snow globes and nutcrackers; and even extended into other sectors such as fall harvest foliage, fireplace screens and hearth accessories, candlelight and outdoor entertainment. ●
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RETAIL AND CONSUMER PRODUCTS, Finalist
Richard R. Norgrove
president and CEO
Bear Republic Brewing Company
www.bearrepublic.com
When Richard R. Norgrove came out of semi-retirement in 1995 to co-found Bear Republic Brewing Company with his son and their respective wives, he had no experience in the then-nascent craft brewing industry. But Norgrove trusted the various lessons he learned during his 20-plus years of experience in the corporate world and the hunch he and his son had about the industry’s potential.
Rather than rely solely upon the success of the brewery — and be at the mercy of wholesalers and consumers who might or might not accept micro-brewed beer — Norgrove opened a brewpub. His goal was to use the brewpub as an outlet to help educate consumers and wholesalers, directly answering questions about what craft beer was through a highly trained staff and top-notch product.
Norgrove’s strategy was effective. Because of his two-pronged approach, the Bear Republic concept — and its craft-brewed beer — took off. Today, Bear Republic employs more than 150 people, including seven additional family members.
Beyond its high-quality beer, Norgrove, who serves as president and CEO, attributes Bear Republic’s success to the company’s inclusive culture.
Employee meetings and one-on-ones with key employees are interactive, creating opportunities to provide ideas and interact with the four owners. He regularly communicates direction and growth of the company, as well as major changes, in an open format where employees are able to understand how they’re personally impacted. And twice monthly on Fridays, employees are served a barbecue lunch where activities are communicated, keeping employees informed on the future vision for the company and its effect on individual positions.
Norgrove’s commitment to fostering this culture has led to strong employee longevity, with several employees working at Bear Republic for more than 10 years. The company also has been named a “best place to work” in the North Bay area. ●
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SERVICES, Award Recipient
Kenneth Lin
founder and CEO
Credit Karma
www.creditkarma.com
Kenneth Lin saw opportunity in a crowded market space by bringing trust to an industry where consumers were frustrated and distrustful of the existing players.
In 2007, when he founded Credit Karma, his goal was to do what others said they would, but didn’t — offer free credit information. Lin sought to establish new levels of transparency for consumers who wanted to take control of their financial health without forcing them to pay fees or deal with small-print conditions. If they had better access to this information, he believed, he could use its members’ credit profiles to match them with better financial services products, which would in turn help banks target more relevant consumers and eliminate waste from their marketing budgets.
Lin’s timing couldn’t have been better. Credit Karma’s site went live in 2008, the same year the bottom fell out of the economy and consumers’ access to credit — along with their ratings — plummeted as the U.S. economy fell into a deep and long-lasting recession.
For consumers, this economic sea change meant that through Credit Karma they could access for free the information they needed to monitor their financial situation. For lenders, who were suddenly tightening credit and implementing more stringent conditions, better match services were an instant necessity in order to keep the pipelines filled with viable customers.
Since those early days, Lin, the company’s CEO, has expanded Credit Karma’s portfolio. Today, the company offers credit report cards, a credit advice center, financial product reviews, auto insurance scores, free credit monitoring, a range of mobile apps, a free credit report and, as of December 2014, credit information from a second bureau.
Financial services providers have the flexibility now to hypertarget their products to suitable consumers, and that’s provided a dynamic and growing revenue stream for Lin’s company and its 35 million members who use Credit Karma. ●
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SERVICES, Finalist
Kathy Johnson
CEO
Home Care Assistance
www.homecareassistance.com
Kathy Johnson, Ph.D., CEO of Home Care Assistance, founded the company in 2002 to provide seniors with a safe, healthy life at home. The formation of the company came out of her experience trying to find care for her own aging parents, both of whom were bed ridden at the time. Unable to find a company that she felt comfortable trusting her parents to, she recognized the opportunity in the market to provide something better.
Home Care Assistance differentiates itself with its tested proprietary and patented methods for a holistic approach to the care of each person’s mental, spiritual and physical well-being. A handpicked research and development team has created a framework to address dementia and Alzheimer’s, implementing exercises that aim to curb the rate of these mental diseases.
One such program Johnson initiated to improve the brain health of older adults is the Cognitive Therapeutics Method™, a research-based activities program performed one-on-one in the home that helps seniors promote cognitive vitality and stave off mental decline. After two years of research, the program has proven successful in promoting the cognitive vitality of seniors. The company also offers its proprietary Balanced Care Method™, a science-based approach to promoting healthy activity, stress reduction and social interaction for older adults.
Johnson’s investment in advancing positive aging has led her to greater contributions to communities on the national and local level. She has co-authored seven books in Home Care Assistance’s Healthy Longevity Book Series with topics ranging from improved sleep and brain health for older adults to dementia care, post-hospitalization care and live-in care for seniors and their families. Over the past 13 years, she and her company have sponsored numerous resource fairs and events for seniors and participated in local community foundations that address the needs of the aging population. ●
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SERVICES, Award Recipient
Mary C. Kariotis
president and CEO
Merrimak Capital Company LLC
www.merrimak.com
As president and CEO of Merrimak Capital Company LLC, Mary C. Kariotis has added over 55 Fortune 500-type accounts and developed a growth trend that could be considered enviable among companies of its type. She has taken the business of equipment leasing and asset recovery and has made each contract specific and tailored to the customer, working with each customer to find innovative ways to save them money while driving Merrimak’s bottom-line revenue.
To do this, she employs open, transparent dialogue in which each party is able to trust that the business partner is acting in their best interest. Kariotis works tirelessly to build these kinds of trusting relationships, and bases her success on their development.
Kariotis took the helm of the company she helped build in the 1990s. One of the biggest challenges she faced during her seven-year tenure happened at the very beginning as she worked to restructure the company to become less dependent on contractor revenue. When she assumed the role of CEO, over half of its lease origination volume came from contractors, which took 40 to 50 percent of the earned revenue for the deals supplied. Kariotis believed this wasn’t sustainable from a revenue or contract standpoint.
Her vision was to have complete transparency from the deals they made with their customers, leaving out the hidden terms and conditions, small print and contingencies that could lead to customers second-guessing the deals. She followed a what-you-see-is-what-you-get philosophy that meant no hidden fees or clauses. That strategy led to 40 percent year-over-year growth.
Kariotis makes quick, difficult decisions, tapping her experience to avoid pitfalls that often beset young companies. She has high expectations for her company and its employees, but even higher expectations for herself. Kariotis cares about the employees she works with and spends time developing their careers as well as the business she runs. ●
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SOFTWARE, Award Recipient
Marcus Ryu
co-founder, president and CEO
Guidewire Software, Inc.
www.guidewire.com
When Marcus Ryu and five colleagues started Guidewire Software, Inc., they were driven to create a company that would apply technology to seemingly intractable problems, build quality products, do right by their customers and be a meaningful place for people to spend their careers. The company focused on serving the property and casualty insurance industry, creating a modular core system suite that enabled insurers to replace their mainframe-based legacy systems with upgradeable, modular software that allows customers to deploy it in an incremental fashion by functional area and region.
As chief executive, president and co-founder, Ryu has been the driving force behind strategic decisions that have helped shape the company’s success. Those include moving from a single-product company to one that provides multiple products and ultimately a platform; and acquiring Millbrook, Inc. — the company’s first acquisition — which helped Guidewire transition an area of relative weakness in its products into a strength.
The company’s model for charging for its software was innovative when first launched. Today, its product strategy has evolved to help insurers engage digitally with their customers and agents across the insurance life cycle and the need to make better use of data and analytics to streamline decision-making and make better predictions.
Guidewire’s culture is directly related to the values of its co-founders and is based on three basic principles: 1. Value integrity, always tell the truth when communicating with customers, prospective customers, partners, investors and each other. 2. Be dedicated to rationality, strive to communicate through clear arguments and make decisions carefully on the basis of factual evidence. 3. Prize collegiality, work together as professional equals with a minimum of hierarchy.
In the years ahead, the company plans to round out its current product portfolio by offering more extensive support across the insurance life cycle. ●
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SOFTWARE, Finalist
Jyoti Bansal
founder and CEO
AppDynamics
www.appdynamics.com
At 22, Jyoti Bansal borrowed $150 from his father to move to Silicon Valley and launch his career in the tech world.
Seven years later, he quit his job as a software engineer and began pitching venture capitalists for funding to start his own company — AppDynamics.
His idea for a highly flexible and adaptive software that relied on what he called “application intelligence” was met with skepticism, but Bansal, who serves as CEO, persevered. He spent his nights developing the technology and days meeting with venture capitalists in search of the right partners who could share his vision.
Greylock Partners and LightSpeed Venture Partners “got” Bansal’s concept and became early stage investors. The technology swiftly caught on, and companies that relied on portfolios of very complex applications tied to billions of dollars in revenue saw how AppDynamics’ disruptive software could help them.
Today, six years after its founding, Bansal’s company is among the fastest-growing technology companies in the world — employing more than 600 people in offices across 12 countries that serve more than 1,700 customers worldwide.
One of the keys to Bansal’s success has been his unwavering devotion to customer service, which led to the creation of the company’s Enterprise Customer Success 2.0 program, which ties incentives to customer satisfaction. As a result, AppDynamics’ Net Promoter Score of 87 ranks a staggering 68 points above the industry average NPS of 19.
Another key to success has been his ability to adapt the company’s organizational structure as the company has grown. He organized the product and engineering groups into nine innovation teams, each comprised of 30 people. Each team is essentially a startup within the company and reports on revenue, customers and progress of initiatives. Each group is empowered to create its own operations and programmatic style, which allows them to eliminate red tape and continue the company’s disruptive innovation model. ●
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SOFTWARE, Finalist
Kirk Krappe
founder and CEO
Apttus
www.apttus.com
Kirk Krappe’s moment of realization came after spending half a day apologizing to customers that the product he had sold them didn’t work as promised. At the time, he was employed with a large public company as the head of sales and marketing.
Krappe eventually quit his job and in 2006 co-founded Apttus with two like-minded people who believed that whatever a company sold better work and bring value to its customers.
As a long-time software industry veteran, Krappe understood the pros and cons of a new high-tech startup. He knew if they could focus on building and creating the right app — one that automated contract life cycle management — they could bypass some of the pitfalls by partnering with another company to host, manage and deliver the product to consumers.
Krappe, CEO, forged a deal with Salesforce.com to build the company’s application solutions on its platform, making Apttus the first company to build exclusively this way. This allowed Krappe and his team to spend their time on development and testing, without worrying about whether the delivery method or app management would fail once deployed.
Krappe’s vision for this unique relationship gave Apttus a built-in customer base that could seamlessly integrate its solutions into existing Salesforce applications. It also gave Krappe the freedom to probe its then-growing client base for ways to stretch, extend and expand the initial product solutions.
As a result, Apttus essentially established the Quote-to-Cash and Configure-Price-Quoting category that existing Salesforce customers use today. Apttus has become the top tool for automating and optimizing sales processes for organization that use Salesforce and counts 70 members of the Fortune 500 among its client roster.
And, because of Krappe’s customer-centric model, Apttus has a 96 percent annual renewal rate for its solutions — among the highest in the industry. ●
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TECHNOLOGY, Award Recipient
Paul Nahi
president and CEO
Enphase Energy
www.enphase.com
Paul Nahi does not have his own office at Enphase Energy. Rather, he and the rest of his management team sit in cubicles right alongside the company’s other employees. Nahi, president and CEO, strongly believes that not having individual offices promotes a culture where there are no boundaries between departments. It allows for the cross-pollination of ideas and a greater feeling of camaraderie across all levels and functions.
The philosophy is incorporated into every aspect of the design of the office, from the location of the coffee machine to the completely transparent boardroom and meeting rooms. For a CEO who believes that passion is one of the most important ingredients of his company’s success, open communication is crucial.
The passion and empowerment has led to a young, very successful business, but it wasn’t always easy. When Nahi and Enphase’s co-founders began to discuss their microinverters with the solar energy community, they were told their idea was impossible and that they were going to fail.
Nahi and the others disagreed, and others were soon attempting to replicate Enphase’s technology. But they all failed to duplicate the company’s combination of technology and execution.
The industry Enphase works in is dynamic and always changing — the future of solar power remains an unknown or, as Nahi describes it, “opaque.” To manage this risk, he and his team are constantly analyzing the market and trends. Their current focus is solar, but the larger strategy is inherent in the company’s name — Enphase Energy.
Nahi would like to move beyond just solar power and become an energy innovator that will include technology in energy management and energy storage.
The key to making that happen will be maintaining a culture that encourages collaboration and an attitude that failure is OK if it ultimately leads to a better outcome. ●
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TECHNOLOGY, Finalist
Conor Madigan, Ph.D.
president and co-founder
Kateeva
www.kateeva.com
Conor Madigan, Ph.D., president and co-founder of Kateeva, realized that while organic light emitting diodes were a great concept, manufacturing OLED devices cost effectively was extremely difficult. Seeing an opportunity, Madigan pioneered the development of an inkjet system that would drive down production costs. The company’s lack of operating history coupled with a radically new technology, however, made the negotiations with large customers extremely difficult.
Kateeva’s product helps large manufacturers use OLED technology to develop flat panel displays for cellphones, televisions, lighting panels, printed circuit boards and thin film solar panels that are super-thin, bendable and unbreakable. OLED material, however, is sensitive to water, solvent, oxygen and moisture, and may not survive the traditional process of printing. In order to solve this problem, the company built an IP portfolio around printing in a super-pure environment of nitrogen.
As the company neared the time to commercialize its application, Madigan stepped down as CEO and brought in an external CEO with experience in capital equipment commercialization who could manage sales support and finance functions. Madigan took control of product development, strategic and technical marketing, business development, IP portfolio management and HR. He embraced an outsource manufacturing model to ensure Kateeva could focus on product development rather than diverting the scarce capital to setting up capital-intensive manufacturing plants.
Funding challenges during the recession brought Kateeva to the brink of collapse. Madigan, through strong leadership, was able to convince his investors to continue their support and his employees not to leave. These actions enabled Kateeva to win the business of some of the largest Asian display manufacturing companies, such as Samsung and LG. Today, Kateeva is the leading supplier of inkjet equipment for OLED mass production, with operations in Silicon Valley, Korea and China. ●
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TECHNOLOGY, Finalist
Peter Arvai
co-founder and CEO
Prezi
www.prezi.com
Paul Nahi does not have his own office at Enphase Energy. Rather, he and the rest of his management team sit in cubicles right alongside the company’s other employees. Nahi, president and CEO, strongly believes that not having individual offices promotes a culture where there are no boundaries between departments. It allows for the cross-pollination of ideas and a greater feeling of camaraderie across all levels and functions.
The philosophy is incorporated into every aspect of the design of the office, from the location of the coffee machine to the completely transparent boardroom and meeting rooms. For a CEO who believes that passion is one of the most important ingredients of his company’s success, open communication is crucial.
The passion and empowerment has led to a young, very successful business, but it wasn’t always easy. When Nahi and Enphase’s co-founders began to discuss their microinverters with the solar energy community, they were told their idea was impossible and that they were going to fail.
Nahi and the others disagreed, and others were soon attempting to replicate Enphase’s technology. But they all failed to duplicate the company’s combination of technology and execution.
The industry Enphase works in is dynamic and always changing — the future of solar power remains an unknown or, as Nahi describes it, “opaque.” To manage this risk, he and his team are constantly analyzing the market and trends. Their current focus is solar, but the larger strategy is inherent in the company’s name — Enphase Energy.
Nahi would like to move beyond just solar power and become an energy innovator that will include technology in energy management and energy storage.
The key to making that happen will be maintaining a culture that encourages collaboration and an attitude that failure is OK if it ultimately leads to a better outcome. ●
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