Work With Steve

My single, shameless prediction/plug for 2012.

There’s certainly no shortage of “prediction lists” that pop-up this time of year. Some are thoughtful, objective, and insight-driven, while many others are just lame, chest-thumping sales pitches dressed up as thought leadership.

Well, admittedly, mine is more like the latter than the former (without the thought leadership part), so I’m going to keep it short and simple:

Bunchball will continue to be an amazing place to work, especially for people who want to make digital experiences better for users and better for businesses, and 2012 will be the year to join us.

We’re ending 2011 on a very high note; we introduced some new enterprise gamification products like Nitro for Salesforce and Nitro for Jive, forged new relationships with companies like Adobe to bring gamification analytics to businesses, welcomed many new blue-chip customers to the Bunchball family, and hired some amazing people from companies like Apple, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Maritz, and UniversalMcCann.

But we’re just getting started. 2012 is going to be a massive year for us; we have some very exciting announcements and launches that will be game changers in the gamification and SaaS industry, and we need lots of people to join our team and help us change the world.

If you’ve made a resolution to put your career on an exciting new trajectory, well, let us help you check that one off right away.  Check out our jobs page here:

http://www.bunchball.com/careers

Happy New Year!

Steve

We love gamification, and we’re not embarrassed to admit it.

One of my favorite books is Good to Great by Jim Collins, and one of my favorite chapters in that book is Chapter 5: The Hedgehog Concept. It discusses an essay by Isiah Berlin called “The Hedgehog and the Fox” based on an ancient Greek parable: 

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

The idea is that day in and day out, the fox devises a myriad of complex strategies to try to attack the hedgehog. And each time the fox attacks, thinking “Aha! I’ve got you now!”, the hedgehog thinks “Here we go again. Will he ever learn?” and rolls up into a ball of sharp spikes. Upon seeing the hedgehog’s defense, the fox calls off his attack and slinks back to his forest to calculate a new approach. Each day the fox tries something different, and each day the hedgehog does what he does best. And always wins.

Berlin divides the world into two groups of people: foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes pursue many ends at the same time and see the world in all of its complexity. They are scattered and diffused, never integrating their ideas into one overall concept or unifying vision.

Hedgehogs, on the other hand, simplify a complex world into a single organizing idea that unifies and guides everything they do. It turns out hedgehogs are the ones who make the biggest impact on the world. Darwin, Marx, Adam Smith, Einstein, Steve Jobs were all hedgehogs.

And the most successful companies - those who make the leap from Good to Great - have Hedgehog Concepts that dictate everything they do. They have a singular focus and a clear sense of what they do better than anyone else, and that’s all they think about, day in and day out. Collins writes:

Those who built the good-to-great companies were, to one degree or another, hedgehogs. They used their hedgehog nature to drive towards what we came to call a Hedgehog Concept for their companies. Those who led the comparison companies tended to be foxes, never gaining the clarifying advantage of a Hedgehog Concept, being instead scattered, diffused, and inconsistent.

At Bunchball, our Hedgehog Concept is gamification. We love gamification, and we’re not embarrassed nor ashamed to admit it. We’d eat it for breakfast if we could. We don’t feel the need to hide behind fancy-sounding, trendy phrases or come up with a different concept of what we do every month. We’ll leave that to the foxes in our industry. We’re gamification hedgehogs.

That’s not to say that we’ll stand still - we’re constantly innovating on our platform and in our strategies to better serve the changing needs of our customers and their markets - but we’re born and bred gamification, and we want to be gamification when we grow up. We’ve been bringing gamification to consumer experiences for years, and now we’re bringing gamification to the enterprise to help motivate and engage employees. Gamification, gamification, gamification.

(by the way, now that Deloitte predicts that gamification will be a Top 10 Trend in 2012, I fully expect the companies who just last month were saying they were social-checkin-loyalty-enterprise-engagement-behavior-anythingbutgamification will be back on the gamification wagon again, until next month when TechCrunch identifies a new trend.)

I share this for two reasons:

1) If you want to work for a great company, look for companies who have a very clear sense of who they are and what they’re great at doing, and be dubious of companies who switch up their strategies every month. The most successful companies in history all had - and still have - a Hedgehog Concept.

2) For businesses looking for serious, reliable and sustainable business partners, look for a partner who absolutely loves what they do and watch out for the ones who are constantly revising their focus. The former will undoubtedly provide you with the absolute best products and services because they’re fanatically obsessed about their Hedgehog Concept. The latter, the foxes…well, they’re likely far more interested in chasing trends, pandering to press and trying to get acquired, leaving you on the sidelines in the process.

Integrity.

Up until six months ago, I spent my entire career in the advertising business, dating back to when I was in college at Rutgers University selling ad space for The Daily Targum. During that entire time, I always had a tremendous amount of respect for my competitors.

I didn’t realize then just how good I had it.

When I was at The Wall Street Journal, we aggressively competed with BusinessWeek, Fortune and Forbes for ad dollars. When I was at MSN, we competed with Google, Yahoo and AOL. And at LinkedIn, we competed with business sites like WSJ, Forbes & The New York Times.  

In each case I knew my competitors well. We would often bump into each other in the lobbies of ad agencies or out at industry events. We would meet up to talk about the online ad business and how we could work together to make it a great industry that would not only attract more customers but also the best and brightest talent. We knew that a rising tide lifts all boats, and to raise that tide we needed to build a marketplace built on solid and honorable business practices that would attract the most respected brands in the world.

When we went back to our offices, we would aggressively compete with one another to earn our shares of ad budgets, but we did it tastefully and with a great deal of integrity and respect for one another.

Maybe we did that because we all knew that we not only represented great brands, but we were the stewards of those brands and stewards of our industry. Everything we did - every voice mail, every email, every presentation, every post we would make on the web, every story we would tell, every comparison we would make to one another - all of it reflected not only on the brands of our employers but also on our entire industry. So maybe that’s why. But I think the real reason was that we just intuitively knew it was the right way to do business.

Since joining Bunchball, I’ve had the exact opposite experience. I’ve heard from tons of customers that a competitor is just flat out lying - telling tales about accounts that they’re stealing from us or just making up completely false and uninformed claims about differences in technologies*. I’ve had candidates tell me that during their interview process with a competitor, the same false claims were made.

The bothersome aspect to me is that in each and every case, the clients and the candidates could see right through what our competitor was doing and found it utterly repulsive. It might seem odd that I would find that bothersome; after all, we’ve won a lot of business and hired great people as a result of their actions because customers and employees typically don’t like doing business with companies that operate that way. But that’s the rub: those practices can tarnish the entire industry and spoil it for everyone.

So, here’s where I’m going with this soapbox: we’re here to build a lasting, sustainable company determined to make digital experiences more enjoyable and rewarding for users and more productive and effective for businesses, and we’re going to do that without compromising our integrity. For the past four years, we’ve been evangelizing gamification and the benefits that it offers brands and employers, and we’re going to keep evangelizing gamification because we believe in it at our core. We’re going to lead this industry by continuing to bring years of experience and great technology that deliver amazing results for customers - the kind that our long-time customer and partner Jesse Redniss of NBC Universal / USA Networks shares in this comment, which happens to be in response to a comment made by a competitor.  

At Bunchball, we’re going to keep building a brand that stands for integrity and solid business practices. We hope our competitors do the same - it’ll make the entire industry much more credible and fruitful, and help ensure it realizes it’s full potential.

Until that happens, if you’re interested in working in this business and integrity is high on your list of employer criteria, we’d love to hear from you; it’s certainly high on our list. Check out the current opportunities at http://www.bunchball.com/careers/openings

*Like most people in the SaaS industry, I too read and thoroughly enjoyed Marc Benioff’s book, Behind the Cloud. I love his entrepreneurial swagger and completely admired his strategy of positioning cloud computing as the new wave and on-premise as legacy. But it’s pretty naive to think that that you can just lift that same strategy and slap it on your business plan in order to compete with the first mover.

Join the fight for the 80%.

A lot of people spend a lot of time doing something they don’t really like doing.

The average person will spend at least 90,000 hours working over the course of their lifetime, and 80% are dissatisfied with their job.  There are a number of reasons: infrequent recognition, ambiguous and non-achievable goals, and a lack of clarity into one’s progress and career path, among many.

Crazy, right? Life is way too short for that number of people to be dissatisfied, and we want to make it better. Let me explain.

Most of today’s knowledge workers will spend a sizable chunk of those 90,000+ working hours using software applications, many of which are optimized for speed and scale, but not always for human behavior. At Bunchball, we’re on a crusade to make every digital experience more enjoyable & rewarding for people and more productive & effective for businesses, and in doing so transform the way people do their jobs in the process. We want people to love using the applications they need to use to get their work done. We think if we get that right, then everyone wins: people enjoy themselves and businesses achieve their goals. And when businesses achieve their goals, they hire more people, and around and around we go…

We do this by helping businesses use game mechanics like points, levels, challenges, and leaderboards to address a few basic yet powerful human motivators: achievement, status, and reward.

Game designers have long known that if you optimize for these motivators, people will spend hours earning points, leveling up and unlocking rewards. But they’re not the only ones who get this; the social networks figured out that showing people a progress bar is a great way to get them to complete their profiles, and the travel industry realized that people will fly your airline if you give them status and let them board before other people do. But why should they have all the fun?

For the past 4 years, we’ve been helping businesses use game mechanics to make their own consumer-facing experiences better, and now we’re bringing these same mechanics into the workplace. We want to help businesses optimize their internal applications and make those experiences more enjoyable and more rewarding for their employees.  We’re off to a great start - our Nitro for Salesforce app, which brings game mechanics to Salesforce.com, won Best New App at Salesforce.com’s DreamForce 2011 event, and we announced our partnership with Jive at their JiveWorld event last month where we’re helping to gamify their Engage platform. And we won’t rest until we help make all of the digital experiences in the enterprise better for users and better for businesses.

Join Bunchball, and join the fight for the 80%. Let’s make work better.

http://www.bunchball.com/careers

Really? I get to do it again?

I feel really lucky.

Back in 2007, I was happily employed by Microsoft. I had a great boss, a great team, and worked for a company that, despite getting a few knocks now and then, really was a great company to work for at the time.  We had a beautiful office in downtown San Francisco overlooking the Ferry Building. Life was great.

One day I received an “inmail” from a little company called LinkedIn, asking me if I’d be interested in joining the company to run their then-nascent ad sales business. In 2007, LinkedIn had just over 100 employees, about 15 million members, had 1 sales person on the ad sales team, and was gearing up for a huge new product improvement: the ability to add a photo to your profile.

And the social media space was still very formative; MySpace was king of the hill (according to Rupert, they were going to do $1B that year…), and Facebook had only just recently opened up beyond the college market. Twitter may have been around, but no one knew much about it at the time. 

Having lived in the Bay Area since 1999, I had often thought that I was missing out on the thrill of working for one of the hot, agile startups that were here in my backyard. But my wife Cindy and I had just welcomed our first child in 2005 and had plans for another, so giving up the great benefits that Microsoft offered and joining a young company was a big decision with a lot of risks.

“Leave Microsoft? But you love Microsoft. Bill Gates doesn’t love Microsoft as much as you do,” Cindy said.  But I made the plunge anyway and made the decision to join LinkedIn, feeling that it was somewhat of a “safe risk” - it was in an emerging space that, from my perspective, had a lot of promise. I made a heartbreaking call to my manager and was sad to tell my team that I was leaving, but in my heart, I knew it was the right thing for me.

“Are you moving to Detroit?” my uncle asked.

“Um, no, why?”

“Isn’t that where Lincoln is headquartered?”

“No, not Lincoln, LinkedIn - it’s like MySpace, but for professionals.”

“Oooohh….professionals, huh?”

“No…not…those kind of professionals…real professionals! Look, networking has always been important in business, it’s just been inefficient and hard to scale, so…”

During my first few months, I hired some incredibly bright people to build the ad sales business with me, and we spent the first year or so having lots of conversations like the one with my uncle, only now we were having it with big advertisers and agencies - and boy was it fun. We were charting brave new territory in a fledgling yet emerging space called “social media.” I still remember going to analyst briefings and hearing people proclaim that “social media sites will never be a meaningful marketing platform,” and I remember how much fun we had proving them dead wrong.

We had a lot to figure out - who was in charge of buying this stuff? What kind of standards did we need? What’s the right way to package, price and sell this? And while that was happening, it all hit the mainstream, and then things started getting really exciting.  Social media started changing the world - literally - as professionals started managing their careers differently, as people connected with friends differently, and people started getting their information in new ways.  Big marketers started to take notice. They invited us to come to their company meetings to present to their staffs and asked if they could visit us for the day at our headquarters. They acknowledged that the way they interacted with their customers and employees would never be the same. We hired more and more great people and started seeing some incredible momentum in the business.

I remember thinking to myself, “I’ll probably never have this again. I’ll probably never be lucky enough to play an early part in an emerging, world-changing industry, and will never be lucky enough again to join a company that’s sitting at the epicenter of that change.”

I feel really lucky.

A few months before LinkedIn went public in 2011, I received a call from a recruiter representing a technology company. I wasn’t interested in leaving LinkedIn, for all the reasons I wasn’t interested in leaving Microsoft a few years back, and normally I would politely decline these calls. But this one was different. This call was for a company called Bunchball, a pioneer in the gamification space.

I had heard quite a bit about gamification, the idea of taking the same concepts that engage people in gameplay - progress, status, and rewards - and applying those concepts to non-game experiences. For one, I had seen it work at LinkedIn. The “profile completeness bar” was one of the most powerful drivers of profile completeness at LinkedIn, an incredibly important component of the LinkedIn ecosystem.  I had also seen people take great pride in showcasing how many recommendations they had or who they counted among their connections - all a form of status.  I had also seen the airlines use it to drive loyalty and the credit card companies leverage it for payment preference.

But I had also seen it at play in things like my daughter’s swim class, where they started awarding stickers after specific skills were mastered to keep kids engaged in between earning their milestone ribbons. And we even used game mechanics to potty-train our youngest.

These concepts were real and tapped into basic human needs - but they were horribly underutilized in so many areas, in large part because it’s not easy to technically incorporate point economies, leaderboards, and reward systems into online experiences on your own. But here was a company with a proven, cloud-based technology platform called Nitro that indeed makes it easy to do exactly that, and they had blue-chip customers that were already using it.  Imagine the potential if so many of today’s uninspiring experiences that feel like chores - learning, staying healthy, working -  were more engaging and rewarding for users, and more productive and efficient for businesses, all because we did a better job at optimizing for human needs. 

Could it be? Could it be that I might actually have a shot at once again experiencing the thrill of joining a small but highly successful company that was leading the charge in an emerging space that has the potential to change the world, and get in early when I can make a difference?

I joined Bunchball in early June, just a few weeks after LinkedIn’s IPO and another round of heartbreaking calls to bosses and teammates.  That was awful, but again, I knew in my heart that I was now addicted to idea of building businesses from the early stages and getting involved in industries during their formative years.  

And what an amazing ride it’s been since then - by far the most fun ride of my career. I’m learning from a group of truly brilliant people, we’re having strategic conversations with the world’s most admired businesses who want to use game mechanics to build better and deeper relationships with customers and employees, and we’re building an industry. And we’re just getting started.

If there’s one thing I learned at LinkedIn, recruiting the best and the brightest is the most important thing a company can do to capitalize on its full potential, and that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re looking for people who are passionate about making digital experiences better, who are passionate about building a great company, and are passionate about changing the world.

If you’ve never experienced the thrill of getting involved in an early stage company in a transformative industry, you owe it to yourself to jump in now. If you have already experienced it, then you know exactly what I’m talking about - and guess what: you can do it again.

Take a look at our openings and join today.