Lisa Calhoun
Welcome back to the Atlanta Startup Podcast. I am so grateful for all of the returning listeners. This is Lisa Calhoun, Founder and Co-Host here at the podcast. If you are listening for the first time, welcome, we are also glad to have you. I want to introduce a really special episode but first, I want to make sure that I reach out to all our regulars and say, if you have not shared your booking ideas with us for 2024, please do. If you go to atlantastartuppodcast.com and click on booking, atlantastartuppodcast.com/booking is also the shortcut. We are interested in knowing what you want us to talk about who you want us to interview founders we need to have on the program and investors too. And so to get back to the episode we have for you today, I recorded this December 7th with one of my favorite ever Atlanta founders CEO Jennifer Silverberg at SmartCommerce. Since Valor invested in their very first round, she has scaled this company to over 20 countries, and over 100 major enterprise clients and scored her Series B. So the conversation I have with Jennifer is not about fundraising, and it’s not about pitching. We talk about lessons learned as a founder through these times of rapid scale. And I think you’re going to find her takeaways, really personal and interesting. I hope you enjoy it.
I met Jennifer probably 20 years ago watching her do her thing as a brand market expert. And I was incredibly impressed. I was honored when I had the opportunity to invest in her seed round. It was 2017, It was a long time ago, Valor Fund 1. Jennifer has grown into such a leader that I will ask her to share a few of the many successes with us. We have a short time here that she is notched on the belt as CEO of SmartCommerce, which has started right here in Atlanta. So Jennifer, would you mind grounding us in your reality? Who are some of your customers? Let’s start there.
Jennifer Silverberg
For those who don’t know me, I’m the CEO of SmartCommerce. SmartCommerce helps consumer packaged goods companies sell more stuff online by making all of their digital touchpoints shoppable. So, which is interesting, because we were the first to do that. And now it sounds like, “Well, yeah, of course, you need to be able to buy anything anywhere”. Because 2020 happened, and, we were doing this in 2017 when people were still saying, are you sure that people are going to shop online? Seriously, the CPG companies that we went out to Marc Pritchard said, “Are you sure people are going to be buying deodorant online and shopping?”
Lisa Calhoun
Shopping for groceries online was unknown. And Jennifer told me we’re going to buy our things on Instacart. I don’t know who’s going to win, really, but we’re going to shop for groceries online, and everyone was like, and I thought, oh, I want that.
Jennifer Silverberg
We got lucky, we had the market turn in our direction, thanks to COVID. But so everything kind of accelerated a little bit.
Lisa Calhoun
When I met you, you had Procter and Gamble on a pilot.
Jennifer Silverberg
Well, we kind of co-founded almost with those. So we did a lot of a lot of really smart things that we didn’t know, were smart at the time, we just kind of fell into them. We had a contact at Procter and Gamble from a previous company we had a contact at Mars Wrigley from a previous company. And so we went to them to kind of help us co-develop how we were going to do this and did pilots to build together and those were all free. And of course, the investors that we talked to, at that point said, yeah, you can get somebody to do something free, but can you get them to pay for it, which was one of the first hurdles that we had to cross. But when they’ve co-developed it, it’s theirs too. And I guess I underestimated how valuable that was. And then, so when we moved, of course, they’re gonna pay you to move to where they had to pay for it. Of course, they were going to pay for it because it was theirs. And they had helped bake it. And they had helped put in some of the little bits and pieces. So again, it was we were just calling on the people that we knew to try to help us make smart decisions, but it turned out to be a smart marketing move that we had not anticipated.
Lisa Calhoun
So today, some of the customers that love you are just people, customers that the audience might know.
Jennifer Silverberg
Well, we’re still working heavily with Procter and continue to grow there. But Procter, Nestle and Unilever, Kraft, Nabisco, pretty much all of the big CPGs work with us and less.
Lisa Calhoun
If you kind of shop for it in a store, the chances are that it is at some stage of contracting with SmartCommerce. So tell us a little bit about what you do for these brands today, what is your platform doing better than anyone else?
Jennifer Silverberg
So our platform, first of all, we’re a data company. We’re a Martech company, so when I explain what we do. But the truth of it is to make it work, we have to be a data company. So we take in data from every retailer, every minute, all day long, and understand what’s in stock and where it’s in stock. Which, when we started the company, it was basically that if we had amazon.com walmart.com, and target.com, we could do 90% of what was being sold online. Well, now there’s buy online and pick up in-store or buy online, have it shipped to your house, or buy online through a third party like Instacart. And so, the volume of data walmart.com went from being a single unit to being 4800 separate things that we had to track and millions of pieces of data across each one of those. So luckily, I had what my first hire number one was a data geek that I knew who had helped build something like this in the past. We’d work together on a company that wound up selling to Google back in 2013.
Lisa Calhoun
And today, how much product to view carted, is it on a high level?
Jennifer Silverberg
About last year was 3 billion, so consumers use our links to put $3 billion worth of products into carts. The year before that it was about two billion.
Lisa Calhoun
How many people work at SmartCommerce today?
Jennifer Silverberg
Well, we have 70 direct employees and 40 indirect employees. So basically 110.
Lisa Calhoun
So, you can see why I asked Jennifer to please join us for a conversation about what she would share with her younger CEO self. And this is directly aimed at us founders in the room for sure, I am looking forward to hearing a little bit about the leader’s journey, because I think as we already know, and accept, it’s a tough one. But Jennifer is transparent and self-reflective enough to share some of her open doors. And so I’d love to, given the scale of what you are achieving SmartCommerce is just past their Series B. So they’ve proved a lot, and they have a lot more to prove in building a globally valuable company. What are some of the things that you feel like, when you were a baby CEO, five, or six years ago, you didn’t know that, you know now, and would share with other founders?
Jennifer Silverberg
Oh, my God, it’s like everything. And it’s funny because I was thinking about if I were answering this question to a set of high school people versus if our college people versus you guys who are, you know, primarily its investors left in this room, I don’t see as many of the founders, right. It’s just an entirely different set of information that I would convey. But I think starting out, one of the biggest things was, that I was afraid of the things I didn’t know, I was so afraid of the things I didn’t know, I was even afraid in the middle of the night that somebody would come to get me because I hadn’t filed a 4017457C, and, and I would be gonna go to jail. I mean, it was just this. See, he’s saying I didn’t file that, I still have this fear. And we’ll get something in the mail that says, you know, where is your PR 247, and I’m like, I probably am still going to jail or something. But no, I spent a lot of time worrying about what I didn’t know. And I had the advantage of I had been a consultant for a lot of years. One of the I was thinking about on the way here today was that one of the best consulting opportunities I had ever had was Ameritech, which I’m guessing nobody here even knows what that is. But a long time ago, it was a really important company that they hired us to figure out what was the commonality among innovative leaders, and visionary or innovative leaders, which was, how cool is to go out and study Walt Disney and Steve Jobs in this kind of thing. And it was, we came back with this whole thing on vision, courage, know-how, and tenacity. And I have those on my wall at home because I thought that was so important. And I think I got myself tripped up on knowing how the thing that held me back a little bit at the beginning of the thing that made me second guess myself so much was, I thought what I had to know was about form 47 to foresee. I think the day I got comfortable was the day that I realized that I needed to know how to walk in the dark trust my vision the courage and the know-how from having done in the past and have the tenacity to keep moving forward. Even when I was walking in the dark, it was always dark. Somebody asked me recently in one of our company meetings, and they said, you know, have you ever failed we had, we had a situation in the last 12 months, I had to upgrade a bunch of people, I had to upgrade our CFO and upgrade our CRO and. That’s leadership language, upgrade some people. Nice way on one of them, but yeah, and so it was a lot of change. And so we have company meetings every Wednesday, we have an all-company stand up and they’re allowed to ask me anything. And one of them asked me, have you ever been here before? Have you ever seen this much change before? Have you ever and I was like, “Oh, hell no, I had no idea. I’ve never been through this before.” I’ve been through change before. So I know how to handle change. And I’ve been through the unknown before. So I know how to handle the unknown. I haven’t been through this exact unknown. I haven’t been through this set of changes. But I guess what I’ve learned is if I have the right people around me and if we have the vision and we have enough know-how and we are constantly doing the things that we need to be doing like learning the market and doing the learning that we need to be doing that. We’re always getting through that.
Lisa Calhoun
So, the thing about Startups is there’s always the unknown is always larger than the known. That’s well always. And so the reason Valor is named Valor is because of the courage where we find that. So I’ve worked with hundreds of founders over decades. And we’re where people break is courage. You generally can find another dollar somewhere, somehow, or change something so that you don’t need it. You can often find people who know more than you know about a topic, and maybe you can’t afford to hire them, but you can buy them a cup of coffee. But when it comes to courage, you can’t teach it. It’s inherent in the person. And I think we can train it up a bit, but for some reason, that part of you that courage, that’s ultimately, what gets you down the road so far. And so when you’re thinking about other things you would share with your younger CEO self keep going, go ahead, you can walk in the dark. I wonder if you would share what you’ve learned about hiring well, and is there is there is there a secret to hiring well, Or is it also courage?
Jennifer Silverberg
I think most of what I’ve learned is how not to hire poorly. So I’m getting to the hiring well, but hiring well. Wow. Hiring when is the other thing is, I think because I thought I had to know everything, or that I was afraid of the things I didn’t know that I maybe was a little slower on some of the important hires of saying. There’s a weakness I have in knowing I don’t have data I knew right away in technology. I heard the data guy and the tech, not the CTO right away because I knew I didn’t know how to do those pieces. But like a CFO, I know enough to be dangerous. But I didn’t know, I didn’t know what I didn’t know about what that was going to bring to the company and how it was going to fundamentally change the way that we made decisions. Everyone’s nodding, like, but I didn’t know that. And so, I think from the standpoint of is the hiring win. And in that case, I had to turn to like, I’ve called on Valerie chinos. But I should tell you have called on Fowler, I’ve called, you know, there are the investors that you call when you’re kind of in that. Oh, shit, I don’t know what to do. And it’s okay to not know. And then there are the other ones that you don’t do that. And so kudos, you’ve done a great job of that. But, I called the different investors who had seen companies go through this space and got feedback on what I needed. So hiring Well, it takes a village, I guess would be the thing I would say you can get the right HR person who knows how to recognize crazy that I learned. No, it’s a thing. You have to get somebody seriously with that spidey sense that goes in. I know they’ve said this because it’s funny when you say courage. My first thought is it’s not all courage. Because courage looks can hide the lack of vision or the lack of tenacity, or the lack of know-how, if there’s enough courage, if there’s crazy, yeah, or even if there’s just hubris, and so it’s making sure that the village talks to the important hires that you they’re all important. They’re all important because anybody anywhere, particularly in an organization, I think, increasingly, you’re probably dealing with fully remote organizations. And so 70 people in the US that are direct hires, all of them are remote. So So building a culture in a remote organization, you have to be even more careful with every hire, because they can pull you sideways.
Lisa Calhoun
And I’ve had the pleasure. And also, you know, I understand the empathy, of going through several cycles of growth as you’ve upgraded the team through the growth. And so I’d love to know what you’ve learned about and more popcorn-quick things. But what do you now look for in a head of sales that you might not have looked for in the beginning?
Jennifer Silverberg
What a great question. So at the beginning, there was a set of three or four of us that held all the intellectual capital of the company, and everybody else needed to follow like, not in a bad way they needed to follow, they needed to do exactly what we needed them to do. Because we knew where we were going, it was a little bit into the murky area, and we needed to hire people who could execute. So my head of sales initially was somebody who could perfectly execute the thing that we already saw. Then I got to Well, I need somebody who can bring their way of executing the thing that we already saw. And in that case, we actually, elevated one of our salespeople who fully had that capability and who stepped into that space. For this last CRO, we need somebody to help figure out to join the group where we’re going to become part of the intellectual capital of the company. So increasingly, our last hires have been the ones who say they have an entirely different point of view. They have a playbook. Oh my god. Yeah, they have a playbook and it’s different from ours. And they come in and they change it and they Make it better and have a voice and have a seat at the table. So, in really that’s been through time, you know how things have shifted is we got to that point where now we need more outside voices. And, frankly, we’ve called on investors more over the last several years because initially, we just needed to put our heads down and do the thing we knew how to do. And now it’s like, what’s the thing we don’t know how to do? What is the thing? I’m not seeing it. What is the what is a way I need help seeing? That’s why I love coming here today because I heard from a lot of people who had a new way of putting something that survived to thrive and 25 I couldn’t live without. So I’m young. I don’t I don’t want next year to be quite as hard as that sounded like it was gonna be but no, I’m teasing. But I think there’s been so much good thinking going on today. I have been taking notes the entire time. It looks like I’m texting. I’m not I’m taking notes of what’s going on to my people.
Lisa Calhoun
Jennifer, you are a wealth of wisdom and understanding. I want to keep us on time. But please follow up with Jennifer because she is all that and more and incredibly articulate and thoughtful about how she’s building SmartCommerce. Thank you so much for sharing with us today.
Jennifer Silverberg
Thank you!
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