A Series of Forbes Insights Profiles of Thought Leaders Changing the Business Landscape: Michael Seifert, Founder and CEO, Sitecore
One doesn’t think of Denmark as a hotbed of technology innovation and entrepreneurship. But out of that cold land inhabited by only 5.5 million comes an innovator and the company he helped found that is growing fast and increasingly muscling in on the burgeoning marketing cloud market that global software giants like IBM, Oracle, Salesforce and Adobe are battling for supremacy. The man is Michael Seifert and his company is Sitecore.
Sitecore positions itself as providing an automated, flexible, and predictive customer experience management platform that seamlessly combines web content management with customer intelligence to drive one-on-one engagement with every customer at every touch point. According to Seifert, it is the first connected platform built from the ground up to enable marketers to deliver integrated customer experiences across touch points and to better manage and measure campaigns.
Spun out of his successful custom software development and systems integration company in 2001, Seifert and four other co-founders have been at the business of enabling business to connect their content with their customers for some time. What started as a content management platform for websites has evolved into a full-fledged experience platform with a global footprint serving clients like American Express, General Mills, Heineken, and L'Oréal.
The company now has over 850 employees in over 50 countries and revenue north of $100 million. Technology Crossover Ventures took a large minority position in the company in 2011. “Our revenue is solid, it’s well north of $100 million,” says Seifert.
“Sitecore was invented as a web development framework. In 2002 when we went on the market, one of our unique differentiators was that every web page was dynamically assembled. That was quite novel at the time. So, in a sense, you can say that without really realizing at the time, we had the foundation for a web experience management system from the very onset. In 2006, I made a presentation for the board, where I declared web content management dead. To me web content management systems at the time were about editing, managing and publishing content, which reminded me of Microsoft Word. You create your document, you revise it, and you print it out. What’s the business value of Microsoft Word? Well, that’s very limited. That was really the onset for the development of our digital marketing suite in 2006. At the end of 2008, we launched the first version of our digital marketing suite, and we had done it quite differently from what was on the market. It had a tough reception with our partner community, because they kept comparing it to Google Analytics. What we had really done was create a repository of information about each individual web visitor. We could then use this information to personalize the experience,” says Seifert of the company’s early transformation from a CMS technology to a marketing platform.
“Marketing is in this super interesting position today. Sales has a CRM system, finance has an ERP system, while marketing has this patchwork of mess that they have to deal with every day. They have a lot of tools, and individually, the tools are great, and serve a specific purpose of e-mailing or working on social channels, or publishing to the web. But each tool works only on that channel, and is limited to the results from that channel. Where is the ERP of marketing? Where is that tool where you understand your customers and where you can figure out how to provide a better experience to your customers? That’s essentially the race I see going on right now, and that’s what we’ve called the experience platform,” continues Seifert.
Seifert’s journey to technology entrepreneur might be unusual for someone growing up in Denmark, but he was exposed to technology and entrepreneurship from an early age. “My whole family’s full of entrepreneurs. While I was born and grew up in Denmark, my father and mother were divorced before I even remember. I was probably a year old. When I was around eight, my father moved to California to just north of San Francisco, and so from a very early age, I spent all my summers and most of my Christmases in California,” said Seifert.
His father had founded a company called Sun-Flex that produced antiglare filters for CRTs. The company also invented the touch pen. Michael liked to accompany his father to work. When he was 11 one of the engineers at the company introduced him to computer programming. “He sat me down in front of the computer. He wrote five lines of code and explained to me what it did. And then he put the manual next to me,” says Seifert. Michael was hooked and spent day and night writing code. Before he went back to Denmark, he had written 5,000 lines of code for his first computer program. “And then I spent the rest of my life working with computers. But literally, throughout elementary school, I spent probably six, eight hours a day programming with some of my friends,” continues Seifert.
At university Michael would study computer science daily and would have side projects in the evening. By the time he finished university he probably had 20,000 hours of computer science experience in one way or another. On top of his passion for programming, he was always starting businesses. He started repairing the neighborhood’s bicycles when he was 12. He and his friends realized that earning money repairing bicycles was tough; it didn’t go so fast, especially when you’re 12. So he decided to try to sell some shares in this bicycle repair company. He sold shares to friends and family. He literally ate his profits—spending money on candy and his fledgling business went bust, explains Michael with a humorous smile .
At 16 he started a more substantial business importing and reselling computer equipment to the island where he lived. While at University, he was one of the principal developers of DikuMUD, an online multiplayer computer game serving millions of users– that was a predecessor to today’s massive role-playing video games such as “World of Warcraft”. Apparently, his days spent with his father in Silicon Valley also gave him a passion for business as well.
After studying computer science at Copenhagen University, Seifert then went to live in Berkeley from ’96 to ’98, and then moved back to Denmark early in ’98. “I called a few of my colleagues from university and suggested that we start a systems integration company together, which we did. That business still exists and is doing well. One of the co-founders, Thomas Albert, recently found the minutes from our very first meeting. Under ‘miscellaneous’ on the agenda, it said, “Michael says that we should invent a software product during our consultancy work and take it global,’” says Seifert.
Another co-founder, Ole Thrane, was developing one website after the other, and he got fed up with all this stuff he had to do repeatedly over and over. He then wrote the first code for what would become Sitecore. “In April 2001, we had a board meeting where we decided that it was so promising that we wanted to spin it out into its own company. We spent the first one and a half years, getting a foothold into the Danish market. We took Sitecore to North America in 2004. I think that was one of those pivotal moments for us as a company. It was quite unusual for a European company to go directly from start-up country to North America. But given that I had spent so much time there, I couldn’t see why not,” says Seifert.
What does the future hold for Sitecore? “I like to say that we have built an experience cloud. Everybody else seems to have a marketing cloud. From my point of view, it’s all about the customer experience. Over the next three, five years, it will be all about reducing complexity for marketing. That complexity needs to draw down. It’s an insane waste of time in marketing,” continues Seifert. If marketing is all about understanding and satisfying customer needs, then Seifert believes Sitecore is well positioned to be the “ERP” platform for the marketing department.
Bruce H. Rogers is the co-author of the recently published book Profitable Brilliance: How Professional Service Firms Become Thought Leaders
