From Corporate Ladder To Corporate Leader: A Tech CEO’s Innovation Journey

Anyone who has ever started a company has a story to go with it. Some did it because they felt it was their destiny, some because they wanted to be wealthy, and others because they had a good idea and this was the only way to see it through. My name is Etai Beck, and I’m the CEO and co-founder of Folloze. This is my story.

I was climbing the corporate ladder at Juniper Networks, receiving plenty of kudos and making plenty of money. I certainly couldn’t complain, and yet… there was something missing. There had long been something deep inside me that yearned to make a bigger impact, to change the world even, and I’d innately known that starting my own company was going to be my way of achieving that. So I finally decided to take the plunge.

When I started thinking about what that company should do, it occurred to me that sometimes the answer to that question can be found right in one’s own backyard. So a close circle of collaborators and I started examining the challenges and opportunities we ourselves had experienced as B2B marketers: How, at massive scale, can one can best articulate individual messages to other people? How do you provide useful information in a way that resonates with each of them? How do you bridge the gap between a provider and a customer and really create a partnership built upon sharing knowledge and building trust?

We pondered the question from many angles – messaging frameworks, sales enablement, story building – when a friend asked, “Hey have you folks looked at some of the hobby sharing sites?” And the lightbulb came on. Of course those were consumer platforms, but the idea of empowering someone to easily identify relevant content, then curate and present it in a way such that it is meaningful for someone else – thereby encouraging them to engage and seek out additional information – would be enormously powerful for an enterprise. So it was decided, the new company would enable businesses to build deeply personalized experiences – with the automation needed to do so at enormous scale – for others, who would naturally be inclined to “follow” along. And thus, “Folloze” was born.

Our timing proved to be prescient. The “old” way of B2B marketing – flooding prospects with content or calls to build a spray-and-pray top-of-funnel – were providing companies diminishing returns for two reasons: First, the resulting tsunami of content received daily through email, web and phone had led to most business people simply tuning it all out. And more importantly, companies like Amazon and Netflix had set a higher bar whereby people actually looked forward to their curation and ability to anticipate what content they’ll find valuable – perhaps before they themselves know.

Translating the Netflix/Amazon experience to B2B meant enabling enterprises to provide their customers an amazingly great experience  – just the right information, at just the right time, so as to make their buying process easier, faster and more efficient. Being able to surface and manage the right information for their customers based upon who they are, where they are, what they need, and who can best help them identify it and obtain it (and enabling that person to be their champion throughout the entire process). At Folloze we placed a wrapper around all this and declared it, “hyper-personalization.”

What I loved best about this approach was that, by employing high levels of automation, Folloze would, ironically, actually empower businesses to provide a deeply “humanized” experience for their customers. The best of both worlds.

That automation was achieved by introducing artificial intelligence (AI) into the equation. Interestingly, AI sometimes gets a bad rap – some people think of it as a way to replace humans. But instead I think about it as a way to help humans address modern challenges. In this case, for example if I, as a potential buyer of your product, need useful information with which to make a buying decision, I expect you as the seller to identify it, source it and surface it for me. Not something broad and generic, rather something very specific to just me and my needs. Kind of like Netflix or Amazon would.

So you have a choice. You could try to do that one-by-one, customer-by-customer, which works okay for maybe a dozen customers. But for anything more, you have to bring intelligence in. You have to bring data and you have to bring some kind of mechanism that can leverage it to decide what information goes to what buyer and how best to provide it. So AI becomes an incredibly important tool for helping humans to – in a B2B world – provide the most relevant information and messaging based upon who I am as a customer, and what I am looking for throughout  my buying journey.

And that’s what we built Folloze to do. For marketers who need to get their companies into the conversation and keep them top of mind at every stage of the purchase cycle, the Folloze hyper-personalization engine uses machine learning, intelligent workflow, and a simple user experience to inspire customers to want to engage.

But building an excellent product was not enough. We also wanted to build an amazing company. We focused on building a company grounded in transparency, where open communication and helping each other were just a standard rather than something that had to be mandated. A culture that fosters a healthy balance between the drive to win and the compassion to help our customers and each other succeed. And to stay true to those values as the organization grows and matures.

It hasn’t been easy, but I am proud to say that these grounding principles are still very much part of who we are. They help guide how we look at the market and how we treat our customers. It may sound cliché, but we really do see each other and our customers as family and a community. In fact, when our customers provide feedback, we consistently hear how great it is to work with our people as often as about how much our product has helped their company to be successful.

Because in the end, one-to-one relationships are still a critical part of what we do here at Folloze and what we enable for our customers. We just enable it at a level of scale that would otherwise be completely impractical. That’s why we like to say, “at Folloze, we work every day to keep business human.”

Written by Etai Beck.

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