Talking Technology: Bill Magnuson
For this installment of Talking Technology, I interviewed Bill Magnuson, co-founder and CEO of Braze.
You’re 31-years-old and the cofounder and CEO of a successful tech startup — can you talk a little about your journey to get here?
I grew up in Minnesota, always loved technology and ended up going to MIT for Computer Science. I graduated in the spring of 2009, just as Android was starting to gain steam, and joined a team in Google Research that was building a visual programming language for Android applications called App Inventor. My work there ended up being the foundation for my master’s thesis, but after completing the degree, I left Google to work for Bridgewater Associates in Westport, CT.
However, it wasn’t long before I started to look ahead to the opportunity of building a company in the mobile space. I had seen the potential of Android first-hand at Google, so in the summer of 2011, Mark Ghermezian, Jon Hyman and I, decided to quit our jobs, move to New York and start building Appboy — now Braze.
Before you stepped into the role of CEO at Braze, you were the company’s CTO; What have the easiest and the hardest parts of that transition been?
Overall, I’ve really enjoyed the transition. My love for technology stems from my love of operating in a fast-changing environment, and the role of CEO at a fast-growing startup delivers that same dynamic challenge.
The hardest part was the requirement to rapidly come up to speed on new areas of the business immediately after the transition. None of it was easy, but the five and a half years I spent as CTO gave me a deep understanding of the technical aspects of Braze, which has been useful in navigating the interplay between our technology and our business strategy.
Last year, your company changed your name from Appboy to Braze and underwent a significant rebrand at the same time — what was that effort like for you? As an engineer, did you kind of think you could just “s/appboy/braze/g” and just be done with it?
Ha! If only it were that easy. Ironically, the only part of the company where we probably could do that (the code), we didn’t fully migrate because we didn’t want to impose namespacing changes on our customers (utm tags, anyone?).
All joking aside, a full company rename, including the rebrand and relaunch of updated positioning with a new brand voice, was a massive endeavor. At our stage and company size — which was about 150 people at the time — we didn’t have a lot of examples to draw from, especially within enterprise software as a service (SaaS). However, we did find great help from the creative agency community.
How do you feel like the rename/rebrand has affected the company?
Internally, we’re really excited about the name — Braze — and the new brand that came with it. The verb “braze” comes from metallurgy, and means to join or bond with great strength. That meaning really matches our purpose as a company, which is to bring together brands and their customers, helping to form and strengthen valuable, long-lasting relationships.
Braze has seen a lot of growth over the past few years in terms of number of clients and the complexity of their needs; can you talk about how you’ve evolved your engineering team as your company’s scale and infrastructure demands spiked, and what made you realize you had to take action?
We’ve grown rapidly over the last few years — we currently manage the relationships of 1.5 billion monthly active users on behalf of our customers, sending tens of billions of personalized messages every month. One consequence of that growth is that we’ve grown into one of the largest digital platforms in the world, with all the infrastructure and scaling challenges that come with it.
Along the way, we’ve been battle hardened in the face of all manner of unexpected circumstances. The most interesting scaling challenges have been at the confluence of massive growth from our clients alongside big cultural events all over the world.
When you’re dealing with the truly global nature of mobile, and communicating across all channels for different types of companies, you need to be ready at all times for whatever the world throws at you. The flip side of that continuous challenge is that we’ve been battle tested and have been able to build confidence in our ability to scale while maintaining high SLAs for performance and stability, but it hasn’t been easy.
To meet that challenge, we have had to focus our engineering team growth to ensure that we’re bringing in people who have experience working on systems of our scale. We’re built on top of a host of new technologies that help us deliver our product, but nothing beats experience when it comes to anticipating and responding to challenges in scaling systems.
The Braze platform is a cloud-hosted SaaS solution — do you find that being cloud-hosted and having a major scaling and infrastructure component to your brand’s value proposition change how you think and talk about building value for enterprise companies?
We talk a lot about the importance of conceptualizing Braze as a vertically integrated stack that, while very valuable in isolation, can achieve even more when it is incorporated into the broader technology ecosystem that drives the end-to-end customer experience. To that end, we’ve built Braze as a stream processor to ease integration with built, bought and combined systems. We work with our clients to support the transformation of their infrastructure into a future state where data streams seamlessly throughout the many parts of their technology ecosystem.
Do you find that you have to contend with perceptions from investors or customers that infrastructure and scale are “solved problems”?
No, quite the opposite. As a technology, mobile has penetrated more of the world than anything that has come before it, which means that we’re constantly looking at new dimensions of scale. However, even if you find yourself momentarily comfortable with scale, then it’s time to challenge what you’re doing and start to work on even more sophisticated strategies, which often require more data, more computation or both.
There’s often a perception that tech startups have to be based in Silicon Valley in order to prosper — can you talk about how choosing to base Braze in New York City has worked out for you?
New York is obviously a vibrant business environment across nearly every industry, but when we started in 2011, the question of “Why not Silicon Valley?” came up a lot because of the depth of the technology and startup ecosystem out there.
Indeed, most of our early investors were from the Bay Area, and our second office was started right in SOMA. However, in the last seven years, New York has become increasingly prominent as a home for new venture-backed startups — we see more and more technology companies growing up here and achieving large scale, and we’re proud to be among them.
We now have offices in London and Singapore as well, with plans to continue to expand as our customer footprint continues to grow.
Can you talk about how keeping the core of the company colocated has impacted the company’s success?
While our teams work to support customers who are spread out all over the world, we’ve kept to just four offices so far. We place a ton of value on the kinds of organic in-person interactions that you get from working alongside a large team every day. We also see a ton of value being generated from the increased teamwork, knowledge sharing and mentorship that comes with interdisciplinary teams being under one roof.
Do you have any concerns about GDPR and the way that shifting attitudes or new regulations related to data and privacy could impact Braze or the larger MarTech world?
GDPR coming into force in May was certainly a wake-up call for many brands and MarTech companies, but it was neither the first, nor the last, piece of impactful legislation that we’ll see in this space.
In the face of heightened scrutiny on customer privacy and brand stewardship of data, the prevailing product strategy for companies like Braze, as well as for our customers, is one that relies on fundamental business values like listening to and respecting your customers, and valuing the relationship with them in the long term. Adherence to those values has given us great resilience in the past, and will continue to benefit us in the future. I’m proud that Braze is on the right side of history here.
Braze primarily works on earned and owned channels — places where a brand needs to earn the right to speak to a consumer, and if they don’t deliver value through that outreach, consumers have the right to rescind that permission. We were also pioneers when it came to helping brands leverage their first-party data to deliver customer relationship management strategies at consumer scale and across channels.
Our business is predicated on building and strengthening the direct-to-consumer relationship. We believe that the value of selling or transferring consumer data can’t outweigh the power of listening closely to consumers and drawing insights from the resulting data to improve the brand and product experience. We see these regulations as helpful changes that ensure a more even playing field among both brands and marketing technology platforms.
What do you see happening in connection with data privacy and security in the U.S. over the next few years?
We’ve already seen California take action independently with the passage of the California Consumer Privacy Act, and I think we’re going to see more individual states follow suit. Ideally, we’ll also get something like that at the federal level to avoid a patchwork of independent regulations. That said, for any global technology company, handling a patchwork of regulation is already a reality.
Your wife, Jen Lewin, is a light and interactive sculptor; What do you feel like you’ve learned from her and the digital art world?
One thing I love about Jen’s work is that she builds pieces that deliver wonderful creativity through a medium that requires modern technology. Her pieces are all interactive, use light and sound to activate public spaces in a way that is very human and create connections between people as they play and interact with the pieces.
It’s inspiring to see Jen’s work provide so much joy to the people that experience it, and to see the vital role that technology plays in delivering that experience. At Braze, we want our technology to enable our customers to express their creative vision for how they communicate and build relationships with their customers, and that means thinking a lot about the human connections between brands and their customers.
Is there anybody who you think is doing particularly thought-provoking work in the digital art space?
I’m a big fan of the data-driven work that Refik Anadol has been building lately. The pieces are largely display or projection based, but they represent a really creative approach to visualizing and synthesizing data in new, interesting ways.
Do you see the business leaders from the technology industry becoming active in the art world, whether as collectors, supporters or enthusiasts?
The entrenched power of the gallery is no longer required for the artist, and it’s just not something that people from the technology world seem to want to deal with when collecting or supporting art.
You’re now seeing artists leverage technology and new ways to communicate with potential collectors and supporters to cut out the intermediary, in ways that are starting to resemble the impact that Spotify, for instance, had on the record labels. I think that’s going to drive a forced evolution of the art world’s old guard, allowing the artist to come front and center and not have it all be about the galleries and the dealers.
Do you think that the art world can engage with problems and ideas that are interesting and relevant to tech?
Art has always been a strong reflection of the problems and challenges of its time, and right now is no different than any other time period in that regard. Personally, I think the intersection of art and technology has a really important role to play right now. We’re experiencing massive changes not just in our relationship with technology, but in our society at large.
