Alex Atzberger Transcript
Clint Betts
Alex, thank you so much for coming on the show. You're the CEO of Optimizely. You've had an impressive career, though, even before Optimizely. Give us your background and how you became to be the CEO of this company.
Alex Atzberger
Clint, first of all, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be on the show, and I was quite fortunate. I think in your life, you have to be very lucky sometimes to be at the right times and at the right spots. So, doing the dot-com boom at the end of the nineties. I had just come out of undergrad at that time and joined a fast-growing, high-growth startup company. I loved the tech space and the transformation that companies could provide through technology. That went into a career in strategy consulting. Then, I started at SAP, where I had the fortune to work with one of the greatest software leaders in the industry, Bill McDermott. I worked for him for close to 14 years or so, and that became a very strong partnership; it gave me the opportunity to run a business called Ariba, which is the world's largest procurement platform, which was a big, big step for me.
Then, I got to run a high-risk and customer experience portfolio at SAP, which is a commerce platform. Also, it is a massive, massive business. Super exciting. And then, at one point, Clint, I said to myself, "I really want to be a CEO of a standalone company, and I want to prove that I can actually scale a business." I joined a company called Episerver at that point, a leader in content management. And that company is now Optimizely. We acquired Optimizely in 2020, and when I joined the company, it was a hundred million dollars business. We just passed 400 million. And so it's been an exciting five years of transformation, and I'm very, very fortunate to be where I am.
Clint Betts
That is incredible. Wow. What growth is to go from a hundred to four? That's wild. That's incredible.
Alex Atzberger
Yeah. We made obvious acquisitions along the way. We obviously expanded the portfolio, but it was all around this vision to say, "Look, can we make the lives of marketers better, and can we bring together solutions in the marketing technology space that really become a platform for marketing teams, just like HR has a workday or sales has like a sales force?" And we become that platform, that operating system for a marketing team where you create content, where you actually publish this content across different channels and continue to optimize the digital experience. That's what we built with Optimizely, and that has driven the growth.
Clint Betts
Tell us about Optimizely, what the product is, why people should use it, and where your focus is.
Alex Atzberger
So, the product supports the entire life cycle or content life cycle of a company. When they create a campaign, they plan a campaign, they build the content for a campaign, this might be physical, asset, digital assets, et cetera, and then they publish them. So, we are a full-contact management system and platform with all the workflows related to the content. And then Optimizely has a very, very strong foothold in testing and experimentation as well as in personalization. So then, we help companies personalize the digital experience that they provide to their customers through our platform. And that entire life cycle that I'm just describing, from planning to publishing to optimization, we call Optimizely One, the operating system for marketing.
Clint Betts
Yeah, that's incredible. So, I actually know Bill McDermott a little bit. He acquired Qualtrics, which is a Utah company, and he actually spoke at one of my events right after he acquired Qualtrics. That was when he was at SAP. We've also had him work with us through ServiceNow. Fascinating individual. What did you learn about leadership from him?
Alex Atzberger
Oh, my goodness. How long is your show? Because it will take some time. Look, I was quite a young man when I first met him, and he was running sales for SAP globally. Bill is one of these very unique individuals who has an incredible positive attitude and optimism. So, the first thing I learned from him is that optimism is a free stimulus that you can tap into. And then, obviously, it's all about people and leadership and relationships. When you work closely with Bill, you see how he builds relationships. I bet if Bill saw you today on the street, he would say Clint to you, would know you by name, and would say hi to you. And he has this incredible gift of remembering names, people's stories, et cetera.
And that's really, really powerful when you build relationships because ultimately if it's ServiceNow if it's SAP if it's Optimizely, we sell software. We try to help companies run better. We try to help them grow revenue, become more efficient, all of those things. Ultimately, there are people who make the decisions about what solutions to use. And when you build those sorts of relationships, it becomes very, very possible, very powerful. And I text Bill all the time, et cetera, and he gets back to me. He's one of the busiest people on the planet, and that makes a difference.
Clint Betts
That's what blows me away. And obviously, you know way better than I do. But what blows me away is when you do reach out to him, he gets back to you quite quickly. I don't even understand how he does that.
Alex Atzberger
Yeah. But one of the things... I was a chief of staff for a while. One of the things is about how fast you come back to people. Some people have meetings and don't follow up after the meeting for days. When you work with someone like Bill or when you work at Optimizely, you had better send a note right away after you have a customer meeting. It needs to come within the next two or four hours if you don't. And I think so much in life is about that, Clint. It's just the responsiveness. There are some very simple things you can do to be more successful. Number one, show up. Showing up is half of the game. The other part is just to get back quickly to people. Don't wait to get back to somebody and respond quickly; it tells the other person they're valuable to you, and that immediately makes a big, big difference.
Clint Betts
Yeah, I completely agree with that. AI is obviously changing every industry in a massive, massive way, and it'll change humanity over the next 10 to 15 years. But in particular, it seems like marketing may have been one of the first areas where it really figured out a niche and a role to play. How are you thinking about AI? How are you using it inside of Optimizely, and how should people think about it as they use it as a marketing tool?
Alex Atzberger
Yeah. So, the way we think about it is that I think the first phase of AI really helped you with very menial tasks, helping you get good drafts a little bit faster. Some of it was a little bit gimmicky, and so on. But what I see where companies really adopt AI is really to say, "What are the tasks or chains of tasks that it can actually do for us?" And when you think about a system like Optimizely, we have companies like Salesforce, for instance, Standard Chartered Bank or GE Healthcare, some of the world's largest companies who use our platform to manage their entire content calendar, all things that they're working on. So imagine you have something you work on, and you want to make a shift to your project, and you want to have a hundred different tasks be changed in the same way. An agent in AI will be able to do this for you versus you going through a hundred different steps and adjusting them.
And so we see that there's a big potential with the agentic architecture that we have to actually in the workflow to make things go faster and actually help people take some of these steps. I think that a big difference between generative and agents coming in is the creative part. I think human beings will want to maintain this for a while to be creative, and it can help in the creative part, but I do think that the benefits around the workflow are going to be far more significant, and that's where our customers have the most interest. The interesting part is that what we try to do within Optimizely is all based on your brand. It's all based on the data we have around the projects that you've run in the past. So, in many ways, it actually keeps it very consistent and understands your context of the work, but at the same time, you can actually tell it, like when we run a campaign, we always create the same five assets, and then the agent can actually do this for you, which is very powerful.
Clint Betts
How hard is it currently to build an agent?
Alex Atzberger
Yeah. Currently, we have built the agent concept for you, but you have actually started to define it. So you would go into our system and say, "In our context as a company, these are the steps that we would most typically do when we do an activity." So, then the agent learns from that activity, and ultimately, it drives it. We have a very strong partnership with Google. We use Google Gemini in our platform. You can also bring in your own LLM, but the most important part is that it actually knows what you are working on and that you, as a company, keep control over what actually is being done and how it's done. And that's what I see with enterprise data. The adoption is always lacking a little bit of the hype in the marketplace, but it will catch up. It's just a matter of time. It will catch up, but there's hype, obviously. But I think what companies need in order to really feel comfortable is to have a sense of both control and definition of how AI is being used.
Clint Betts
How do you, as selling this software, selling agents and really helping people understand how AI is going to be a very important part of their workflow moving forward, how do you get them to have that confidence? That does seem like a big piece of AI here is like how am I confident that what I'm using is actually going to produce the results?
Alex Atzberger
I think that's a big part. Look, I believe in authentic communication, for instance. I write all my own LinkedIn posts and other things, and I believe authenticity is very important. And I think that's one of the things where AI is challenged to be really that authentic in terms of the brand voice. I think that the interesting part will ultimately be the business results and the business value that it can create. So because technology, be it the internet, be it mobile, be it now AI, does come and go, and it continues to evolve, but it's always in service of something we want to achieve as human beings. When I run a company and look at my marketing, there are certain things that I want to happen faster. There are other things that I want to do more cost-effectively.
One of the biggest challenges that all of our customers face is the lack of resources to do certain things. We are one of the largest platforms, not the largest platform for experimentation and testing. A lot of companies want to run more tests and want to do more testing, but they lack the resources to actually do it. And so AI obviously solves and can solve that issue. And having a second Clint or a second Alex in the company can be really helpful for companies to scale. And it doesn't mean that they replace Clint or Alex, but it means, like, hey, it actually allows me to do more.
And I think that's what I find in many companies. They have such a long to-do list of what they actually want to do. This is a very simple example of what we saw a lot of adoption in. We are on a lot of websites. We have helped a lot of companies with their digital presence. One of the biggest topics is the translation of those websites. Now, it's a simple use case, but this costs companies tens of thousands of dollars. Now we are talking about hundreds of dollars, and we are talking about it being immediately there. That's a huge value driver for something that is otherwise not very differentiating, but it's necessary. And that's a great example of applying AI.
Clint Betts
Yeah. Yeah. The way AI is going to be integrated into workflows and into companies is fascinating, both internally. It does seem like a lot of it is internal. How do you become more efficient as a company, and then soon, it'll even be external in the products and all of those types of things that you're already doing through Optimizely? What does a typical day look like for you as CEO?
Alex Atzberger
Well, my typical day is an interesting word to use. The word typical is fun because I think the fun part is that it's obviously not so typical, but there are certain consistent parts, obviously. I have a very simple mantra. I want to speak to one customer a day. I've done this my entire career, where I said, "Look, I need to speak to a customer a day." It's the part where I get the most energy from, which is from the conversations. I'm not a big fan of playing office and being in the office to just do that. I want to be out there. I think it's important that you connect to your customers, your partners, etc. I also take a lot of joy out of being with colleagues and the team as we actually learn together and actually move the company together. I'm a big in-office person. I like the office a lot, so I go to the office five days a week, and that's my attitude.
The world has changed. A lot of people don't do that anymore, but that's okay. But I like that connectivity with people and actually working with them together. I start my day at five in the morning with a cup of green tea. I probably have 20 cups of green tea during the day; that gives me my fire and my energy during the day. I try to really think through with my team on a 12-week basis what the things that we need to accomplish are. A quarter has 12 weeks. Every week has a certain cadence to it. There are some things that are standard operating procedures in our company about how we run the business, what happens every week, and then other things that are obviously completely unpredictable depending on what happens in the world. In the last couple of years, Clint has just shown that I think being adaptive and adapting to different scenarios has become absolutely essential.
Clint Betts
How do you think about building culture and leading the culture within your company?
Alex Atzberger
For me, the culture is completely ever-evolving. It depends a lot on our actions and what we re-emphasize in terms of the stories that we tell as a company. I'll give you a simple example, Clint. We acquired a company three years ago, a company that had 120 people or so; the founder was a very charismatic person. He's still with the company. He's now the president of the business. Fantastic individual. But the culture that we brought in with this company was fantastic. And I felt like, look, we can benefit a lot from that culture. And so we really brought these cultures together, but they come to life with sometimes very simple stories that people can get. One of them was a story that actually came from another company altogether but that they kind of took in as part of their culture. And it was about a snake. You see a snake in the building, Clint. Now, what do you do?
You have two options. You can either call a meeting to discuss why the snake is in the building, or you can form a steering committee to discuss the snake, and then you can make a decision on what to do with the snake. There's an alternative. The alternative is you just kill the damn snake. So, we decided that as a culture for the company, we wanted to kill the snake. So if you see something, do something about it. As somebody who's been in large companies, I believe that agility is the benefit of smaller companies. If you can't move faster as a smaller company, that would be shocking. So, you need to move faster, and you need to be able to take action quicker.
There are good reasons why, in other companies, as you scale further, that becomes harder, but you need to do this as a company of our size. And so, for me, those are the kinds of trades that we then talk about. And if somebody kills the snake, we call them a snake killer or her, and say like, "Oh, that's great. You just did this." And we celebrate it. And I think that then forms a culture, and that's where the stories get told about. And people understand that they have the ability to kill the snake. They don't need to call somebody else to tell them about the snake. They can just do it. So that's for me about culture.
Clint Betts
What do you read, and what reading recommendations do you have for us?
Alex Atzberger
So, we share a couple of books as a leadership team, and we also share them with the entire company. The one book is called Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal. We also had him as a keynote speaker at one of our events, and he was probably one of the best keynotes that I've ever heard. General McChrystal also talks about the battlefield that he inherited when he led the US troops in Iraq. It was basically that the war had changed from being an open-field war to a war in the cities where it was very difficult to actually fight the enemy because you never knew where the enemy was. And he created this model where he brought teams together, and he had a daily call with 8,000 people on the line. It's an incredible story, and that made information move so much faster.
For us, this is a really important book because we talk a lot about how marketing teams shouldn't be so siloed or shouldn't be using 15 different solutions but rather one platform to communicate much better. So that's one book that we absolutely cherish. We think it's amazing about just management and leadership. The other one that I personally love and gave to my leadership team this year is Frank Slootman's Amp It Up, the CEO of, I think, earlier this year, left Snowflake, et cetera. But I thought Amp It Up was just a fantastic book. And I talk to my team a lot about "How can we amp it up?" And I thought sometimes you read books that just speak to you so much because every point in the book is something you can underline, and that's one of them.
Clint Betts
What are some products, apps, and tools that you could not live without that you use every day?
Alex Atzberger
So I know this sounds cheeky, but I do use our own Optimizely solution every day because I actually... even when we prepared for this podcast... My marketing team manages all content on our platform. So, I use our platform every day, and I love it. But the other tools that I use, I think Clari, are for revenue management and forecasting. As a software CEO, it's very important to me because I actually can see where my team is at. I can see where our opportunity is at. That's very, very important. And I tend to be somebody who really wants to self-serve as much as possible. So I don't want to ping somebody and say like, "Oh, send me that deck or send me this." I do think it's important that you use real-time data.
And so our team has done a lot at both building internal AI tools, building internal reports, et cetera, that make it much easier for me to scale. If you use Teams, Slack, etc., those applications become super important. And for me, it's about there; it's about you needing to use all channels to reach people. LinkedIn has become a platform where I find it sometimes rather than sending somebody an email. If I put it on LinkedIn, more people see it sometimes in the company than if I tell them through an official email. So that's become a big part of my communication style as well.
Clint Betts
How did you think about 2024 and kind of the interesting economy that we were all in with some industries obviously doing really well, some not as well, the election, which had some uncertainty. Now we're past all of that. How did you manage 2024 and how are you thinking about 2025?
Alex Atzberger
Yeah. Look, I think in technology, as a technology company, we serve all sorts of businesses, including financial services companies like American Express. We serve software companies like Salesforce. We have a wide portfolio of companies with which we work. And we oftentimes see obviously how the economy changes. So, is retail going strong or not? What are people are investing in? And I always tell people to bring an umbrella if it rains. The world is not always sunny. Sometimes you need to adjust. For instance, this year, we invested in making our platform HIPAA-ready in order to serve healthcare companies. And we've seen some great traction in that vertical in healthcare because that's where money is being spent and where a lot of investment is going in. Plus, there's a big digital transformation happening in healthcare. There might be other sectors where you say like, "Oh, look, this is not the best industry at this time to invest in."
So that's kind of like how we manage it. And we try to be very specific about which are ideal customers for us to serve because it's a wide market. In my view, Clint, it's always that the market is not limited. The market is massive in its opportunity. And when you participate in the US economy, for instance, which is half of our business. Half of our business is in Europe. Half of our business is in the US. You participate in the strongest economy in the world. And now, of course, the economy might not be doing as well in some sectors as in others, but there's plenty of opportunity for a company our size to find growth and keep expanding. The other thing that we did this year, but also '23, but especially this year, is just to be very, very specific about how we add value to our customers and really think about the return on investment.
And look, we are in a space where there are about 15,000 different vendors for MarTech. It's a very complicated space. If you go to a website, it sounds like the other company; everything sounds the same. It's very difficult to distinguish. Our distinction is that we said we bring one platform together to do multiple things for the marketing team because we believe it's not efficient for companies to have a hundred different apps and to have all these apps integrated with each other somehow. We think it's much more powerful to actually drive a high return on investment. So, for us, talking to the right customer, tying it to an ironclad business case, and then delivering the value is what we focused on in '24. And I think there's a lot of bullishness about '25 now in the market, and we will see how that unfolds. I think the only thing that I can predict about the future is that it will continue to be unpredictable because that's typically what happens, but that's where I think you need to be just adaptable.
Clint Betts
Yeah. Yeah. I think you're exactly right. Finally, we end every interview with the same question, and that is at CEOdotcom, we believe the chances one gives is just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Alex Atzberger
Oh, then now we go back to where we started. I do need to say Bill McDermott to that. I'll tell you a quick story. It was during a 4th of July weekend. I was in an office, and Bill walked in. He had just been promoted to be a board member at SAP, and he needed somebody to help him with his pitch. He walked over to my desk because I was the only one in the office, and he said, "Hey, do you have some time?" And it was the 4th of July weekend. I was by myself. My family was not in the US, et cetera. So I said, "Yeah, sure." So I helped him out. Then he gave the pitch, and he called me the next week from a car in Germany and said, "Hey, Alex." And I said like, "Hey, Bill." He's like, "Alex, by the way, the pitch we worked on, it went amazing. From now on, I want you to work on all my pitches." And that's kind of how I started. Somebody took a shot at me, gave me a chance, and then I built a strategy team. Then, we took the journey further. So you need to have that lucky break, and I'm very, very thankful for that.
Clint Betts
That's incredible. Alex, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on everything you're working on, and yeah, I really appreciate it.
Alex Atzberger
Thank you so much, Clint. I appreciate it.
Edited for readability.