161. Jeff Bussgang on Open Market and early eCommerce

Sam.

Welcome to the Internet History Podcast. I'm your host, Brian McCullough. Happy 2018, everybody. We're going to start off this new year by going all the way back and looking again at the birth of E commerce. As I've said before, it always frustrates me that when people think of e commerce now, they basically think of Amazon. And that's the whole story. Maybe people remember there were a bunch of dotcoms like pets.com and such, but then they all went belly up. So I guess it's Amazon and that's it, right? Well, of course that's not true because there was really nothing as wide open and wild west like as e commerce was at the very beginning of the web. Back then, no one knew what worked. And a whole bunch of startups that history tends to forget took a lot of big swings at trying to solve the problem. And one of those startups was called Open Market. One of the things you always hear in tech is that old saw that when there's a gold rush, the easiest way to make money is by selling people shovels. And that's exactly what Open Market essentially tried to do. Instead of trying to sell something specific like books or pet food, OpenMarket basically tried to sell everyone the tools that would allow people to sell something online. The original concept for Open Market was an online mall, but this evolved into creating the software and infrastructure for other online retailers to blossom, all using Open Market system. And honestly, if you were an investor in the mid-90s looking to back an ultimate e commerce winner, who do you think you would have put your money on? A site that just wanted to sell books, or an entire company that was looking to empower all of the millions of e commerce players that seemed likely to come to the market? On the strength of this notion, as I mentioned in a minute, I'm pretty sure that Open Market was the second web company to IPO to a billion dollar valuation, after Netscape, of course. And so today we're going to hear that story. We're going to talk to Jeff Busgang, one of Open Market's earliest executives, to try to get the story of early E commerce and the story of the company that was OpenMarket. Jeff Busgang, thanks for coming on the Internet History podcast.

My pleasure.

Well, I want to weave your career story into this interview, but could we start before we bring you into it? Recount for us how Open Market got started. I know that it got started before you joined up, but basically, who were the guys that founded it? What was the idea? And when did it get started?

Sure. The company was started in 1994 by an MIT professor named David Gifford. David had invented many of the original IP intellectual property around secure Internet commerce. What we know today, and I'm sure we'll come back to that. So David was an MIT professor. He came up with the idea. He reached out to a number of venture capitalists, and one of them, a firm named Greylock, connected him to a local entrepreneur who was a business executive named Shekhar Ghosh. Shekhar was a former HBS Harvard Business School graduate, BCG alumni, had just come off a successful startup of his own and was looking for his next thing. And the Greylock folks put the two of them together, and in 1994 they started the company. And the original vision was very broad. It was to create an open marketplace, open market out of the Internet, and to allow for the infrastructure required to make the Internet a secure business environment.

So again, I want to underline, this is what, like February of 94, early 94, at least. So this is before a full year before the Netscape ipo. This is before Amazon even launches or anything like that. So is it a case of as the Internet starts to. As the Web itself starts to become mainstream? Is it, well, what are we going to do with this? Let's see if we can sell stuff online. Is it just kind of groping around in the dark at first?

There was definitely a lot of groping around in the dark. I joined after the Series A. The company was about 30 people at the time. And I remember that out of the 30 people, we were 25 or so engineers working on a dozen products. I mean, there was a really broad range of things. It was the land grab of the early, early Internet days. So we had a browser product, we had a web server product, we had a secure Web server product, we had a shopping cart product, we had an E commerce platform. It was a very dramatically intensive experimentation era.

Well, you mentioned also that maybe the original idea was to just be an online shopping mall. And I'm always sort of speaking of groping around in the dark to see what works. The idea that a lot of early Web things were bringing these metaphors from the real world into a virtual world, was that the original idea? Idea? Let's just set up some sort of framework where people can do business and then we'll take a cut, that sort of thing.

That's right. One of the original visions was an online shopping mall where we would go to banks and telecoms companies. And back then there was no wireless carriers. So the telecom companies were extremely powerful and just coming off of their monopolies. And the banks were extremely powerful and each of them had all the merchant relationships. And so the thinking was, let's build an online marketplace, an online mall. We'll sell it to banks and service providers like telecoms, and then all the merchants will subscribe to those services, they'll build online storefronts, and then they'll pay us a cut of the action.

And I read that there was also, at least early on, an idea that consumers would also maybe pay a membership fee for, for online shopping and things like that too.

We experimented with a lot of different ideas and business models. But yes, one of them was that. And since you mentioned it, there was no Netscape was not a prevalent browser at that time. Microsoft hadn't yet come up with its browser. And so we thought there's some. Because you needed a browser to interact with the server. And so maybe we should provide the browser software and there would be some fee that we could pay consumers to enable the secure transactions. Because to do secure transactions, you needed an SSL connection between the server and the browser using the various protocols that were just becoming available at the time. And that piece of software we thought could be also an opportunity to make some money off consumers.

Well, let's talk about, you mentioned ssl. Let's talk about again, these being very early days. I remember that there was like just this whole competing systems like Visa and Microsoft, I think, had one approach at some point, and then like MasterCard had a separate one, and then there was like a Netscape and IBM combination and things like that. So very early days, was it also sort of navigating what sort of system would be become the prominent one?

Yes, it was an era of standardization. It was so new that there were a lot of competing standards and there were all these consortiums floating around. The media companies created consortiums. The newspapers, the banks created consortiums. The telecoms companies created consortiums. Everybody was running around trying to define the plumbing. It reminds a lot of what's happening now in the blockchain, which is a whole other conversation we could have. But if you think about a lot of the efforts that are going on right now in smart contracts and Ethereum and forks and debating what's the right protocol and what's the right transaction speed and what's the right way to handle errors, these are all things that had to be figured out. In the early Internet era of the mid-90s and at open market. We were right in the middle of all of that and trying to find a way to make money off of it by selling commercial software.

Well, one thing regular listeners will know, I've said several times on this show that people think things like, obviously the blockchain is new, but one of the first ideas that people had when the web came around was this idea of digital currency. Also in this environment in 94, there's. I remember, Cyber Cash first virtual. So there was like, literally, if the first idea on the web was to publish and the second was to sell, the third was probably this idea of enabling commerce in a more frictionless way, in a more efficient way.

That's right. Digicash was founded in 1989, and Cyber Cash, I don't remember exactly, but I think it was founded around this same time period in the early 90s. So this notion was very. A lot of the academics out of MIT and Stanford were working on this very idea. And. And we were trying to build the software that enabled it. And so we actually partnered with some of these companies to try to run some experiments where people could buy an article of the Wall Street Journal, who was one of our early customers, for a mere 99 cents.

Right. The micropayment thing that everyone's still chasing.

Yep, yep, yep.

All right, so I think it's probably about time to bring you into this. So I read a little bit articles from around the time, and I think the timeline is that initial sort of online mall idea was sort of scrapped. And the original investment, they were running out of cash. And so they're starting to try to come up with a. Try to pivot to a new business plan. I believe around 95. That's when you start to come into the picture.

Yeah, I joined in the spring of 95. As I said at the time, it was 30 employees. And it's funny looking back, and in fact, I don't think of it as what we were doing was pivoting as more trying to winnow down ideas. We had so many ideas and so many products, and eventually we focused in on one single product and one single idea, which was to build the large enterprise software platform that would allow everyone to conduct business securely on the Internet. And so a complete order management, shopping cart transaction, secure payment platform that would allow large retailers and small merchants to do secure commerce online. And that was. Sorry, that was the vision behind our IPO, which we executed in the spring of 1996.

Well, before we get to that, what was your background? I think that you're almost fresh out of school at this point. You might have done some consulting before you joined up, but what was your background?

That's right. Briefly. I was a computer science undergrad, worked as a management consultant for a couple years at the Boston Consulting Group, went back to Harvard for business school, and then this was my first job right out of business school. So I was 26 years old and fresh out of business school with pretty much zero experience.

Well, but no one has any experience with doing what you're trying to do, so that probably didn't matter in the end.

Exactly, exactly.

So I don't know, first day you show up, like first week, first month, what are your marching orders? What is your first project?

So at the time I was hired as a product manager and in a company where there were like a dozen products, as I said before, but I was one of only two product managers. We had to very quickly rationalize what the heck we were going to build when the company was all engineering and when the world was our oyster. We ran a lot of experiments, as I said. But so many other companies were jumping into the space and getting venture financing and carving out different parts of the ecosystem. We had to very quickly decide, what are we going to focus on? And how do we build a product that customers are actually going to buy? So my first effort was around focus, and my second effort was around product management and driving priorities and requirements in the product roadmap to meet the needs of customers in a market that didn't exist. So we had to really quickly talk to customers and figure out what they wanted and try to envision what we could build to meet their needs.

And who are these customers? Again, keeping in mind that this is 95 and basically no one has a website. Some of the people you're talking to, so who are you talking to and what do they want to do?

It was the biggest platforms at the time. So companies like Time Warner, Wall Street Journal, all the big media companies, AOL at the time was moving towards the Internet and they were an emerging media company. Lycos was a new media company. So it was those types of companies that were directly building transaction capabilities and wanting to sell things. And then also the service providers, the big banks and the telcos that I mentioned earlier. So all the big banks and telcos like AT&T and others.

So essentially you create. You're creating essentially commerce platforms for, like Pathfinder. If Pathfinder wants to also have E commerce alongside ads in terms of revenue, you're doing that for them. And for the banks, what are you specifically doing? Are you allowing them to do banking Transactions.

Yeah. So for Time Warner, Pathfinder, since you mentioned Pathfinder, that was their Internet content initiative. These were all in Wall Street Journal and others. These were all big media companies that were trying to sell subscriptions online and also sell some goods and services. But they were mainly trying to figure out a way to digitize their content and still monetize it. So we built an E commerce platform that allowed for content management and subscription services. I'll tell you a quick funny story about that and then I'll answer your question about the bank.

Yeah, please.

Time Warner. At the time, the executive who ran the business was a gentleman named Paul Sagan. Paul Sagan later became the CEO of Akamai and a very successful executive over a dozen years. At the time, he was a new media executive running the Pathfinder initiative. And I didn't know him at the time. I was sent down to meet with him and his team to help explain to them why it would take four weeks for us to move a piece of HTML text from one side of the page to the other side of the page. Because our system was so rigid and WYSIWYG tools and whatnot were just not available at the time and everything was so hard coded that, that we literally could not make any changes to these HTML templates without getting core engineering involved. And then QA and then release cycles. I mean, it's ridiculous. At the time, with the cloud nowadays, it sounds absurd, but at the time we had to literally ship them golden copies of software in CDs on disks. Yeah, CD disks come to their office and install that system. And so we had this long installation procedure and everything else. And so literally every time they would want to make what seemed to be a very simple change. And he's thinking like a media executive trying to change the layout of a page. And I'm trying to explain to him software, you know, perpetual software and transaction system release schedules 101. It was a bit of an impedance mismatch.

Yeah, well, that's again, it's the metaphors that they understand and trying to get them into this new. Into this new paradigm.

Yeah, exactly. By the way, I still have on my desk and I can send it to you if it's of any interest, a picture of it, a copy of the software that we shipped to people like them. It's called. It was called Transact. Yeah, the product name. And yeah, send that over.

If it's something I can share, I'll put it on the website and there'll be a link in the show Notes you mentioned Transact. And so like Transact becomes the main all encompassing product.

Yes, that became the main product that we went public, you know, moved forward with and went public on.

And it's an end to end solution. So again, if I'm Time Warner, it's a whole platform. You handle the upfront, you handle the back end, you handle the transactions, the settling of funds and that sort of. It's the whole shebang.

Exactly.

One thing that we haven't talked about before, we get into things like ipoing and becoming a company in the bubble and all that stuff. I've asked a bunch of people about this. What was your memory in terms of a consumer and the uptake of the consumer in terms of being willing to buy online? Was there a lot of reticence at the beginning? Was there a lot of educating consumers that needed to be done?

Yeah, huge amount of reticence. A lot of conversation about will consumers ever type in their credit cards online? And is it possible that that could be a secure process that consumers would trust? And many people thought it would never be. And it took a while for consumers to feel comfortable doing that.

Yeah, I saw a quote where someone, one of your executives, was bemoaning the fact that consumer sales on the web weren't materializing as quickly as you had hoped for. Do you have any sort of memory of that? Was there a period of time maybe like 98, 99, when all of a sudden, okay, we've got traction here in terms of people feeling confident buying online.

I would say when the IPO started to happen and the bubble started to get inflated. One of the benefits, and again we see this in many other bubbles like crypto and others, is that everybody started to talk about it until it became mainstream. And suddenly everybody was comfortable buying on the web because it was such a mainstream thing. And the brands that were doing it seemed like trusted brands. So if AT&T allows you to buy stuff on the web, or if Citibank is allowing you to buy stuff on the web, it must be okay.

And then in just a few short years, eBay comes along and people are willing to buy and sell from strangers. So it takes a while, but once you hit that upward slope, it's maybe rapid. Yeah, exactly. Gary Eichhorn is brought in to be the CEO, right?

Yeah. Gary was a well regarded executive coming out of HP at the time. HP was viewed to be one of the best managed companies in the world. And at the time, Gary was a CEO successor candidate and a rising up and comer in his early 40s. And it was a huge coup when we were able to hire him to help lead the company going forward. I remember one of our investors, I think the Greylock board member said, declared to his partners, we found our Jim Barksdale, who was famously the CEO of Netscape, that they pulled out of FedEx maybe six months or 12 months earlier and helped Netscape go public. And so we were thrilled to get Gary on board. And Gary walked into this company, which he thought he was walking into, a company that was going to go public in six, nine months and on a rocket ship and a well managed professional company. And he realized it was complete chaos, a complete mess. It was much raw material than he realized and appreciated. And he had a lot of heavy lifting to do to get us organized to get ready to go public.

One of the things that people remember historically is this notion of companies being able to go public six months after being formed or something like that. You guys are really early, way before what I would even consider the bubble. Your IPO is May of 96. What do you remember in terms of that? In terms of what Wall street was looking for, what, by May of 96? Because this is like the second wave when Yahoo and Excite and people like that are going public. What was required to go public? Did you have to show sales growth or was it all just about the potential of the market, that sort of thing?

Just to give you a perspective, we had when we filed the S1 in early 1996, we completed our 1995 financials, we had $1.8 million of revenue and none of it was product revenue. Most of it was professional services revenue because we hadn't yet fully shipped the product. Transact 1.0 was not shipping until May of 1996. In fact, I remember Gary cornering me and asking me, when will you ship this product? Because we can't go public unless we have a shipping product. And if you're going to be delayed, then we're going to delay the ipo. So it was very high stakes, high pressure. But to answer your question, it was very much about vision and big market vision and quality of team. The thing that really, I think, inspired our public market investors was that we had this amazing senior management team. I remember Gary flashing a slide up. One of his first or second slides in the IPO roadshow was the number of years of experience that each of the senior executives had at the time. He recruited a terrific management team and he made a would have a standard joke in the IPO roadshow presentation where he said, you know, this is not the ages of our executive team. These are their years of experience. Because a lot of companies were rushing to go public with 25 year olds running the company who had no idea how to operate and execute an ipo, nevermind a public company. So that was, I think, something that investors really resonated with. Massive opportunity, a lot of promise, good logic to the vision and the strategy, and a really high quality management team.

Your IPO is May of 96, like I said, and I think you have a market cap of 1.2 billion on that first day, which actually I think I'm going to have to go back and look at, look at some numbers here. But you might be the first dot com company after Netscape to IPO over a billion. So that allows you what essentially like, like you said, you're still building out the product, but does that, do you do like other people do an ipo and that allows you to start acquiring companies like what is, what does the IPO do for you?

In 96 we raised $76 million in the IPO. So as you point out, it was a pretty good sized IPO at that time. Even in today's numbers, it's a reasonable sized IPO 20 years later. And it allowed us to have a ton of capital to build the team out more fully to raise. We ended up hiring something on the order of 300, 400 people and were able to achieve market leadership globally. We very quickly went global. So we hired a lot of salespeople. We built out an international team in Europe and in Asia because the Internet was going global very quickly and companies were looking for service providers all over the world. And it allowed us to declare market leadership such that if you were a company considering, if you were a business considering getting onto the web, you heard about open market because we were the first out in front and Netscape was positioned as the consumer company and we were positioned as the business company.

Well, but Netscape's also trying to pivot, there's that word again to serving corporations and actually producing server software and things like that. So are you competing with them as well?

Yes, for that part of their business. On the browser side they were competing with Microsoft. Microsoft jumped into Internet Explorer and on the server side we were competing with them. And our pitch to companies was that we were the best focused business partner because that's all we cared about was the enterprise customer. And so we sort of had the market all to ourselves for a few years. We were the market share leading company in E Commerce for I think it was 96, 97, 98 or maybe it was 95, 96, 97 like that for three or four years and then we lost it, which is a whole other story. But anyway, for a few years we had a pretty open playing field. And our revenue went from 1.8 million to 22.5 million to over $60 million in just those two years, which is pretty extraordinary for an enterprise software company. A SaaS company would never see that growth. But we were able to achieve that growth because we were a perpetual licensed company, which was the model back then. So you could 10x a company in revenue as an enterprise software company.

Well, why do you lose that ownership of the market by 98, 99? I feel like there was a plethora of people doing similar things. Like even Yahoo has Yahoo stores and things like that. Is that sort of the thing like it just becomes a really crowded marketplace?

It just got really crowded. The capital markets were wide open, so anybody could raise money at very cheap prices. And everybody saw the same opportunity we saw. And so all sorts of companies popped up. Vignette, Broadvision, Intershop. You mentioned Yahoo. There were just a ton of companies. These are names that people may not remember anymore, but these were sort of the big competitors of that era. And then the big companies like IBM and, and Microsoft also got into the business. So it got very, very crowded. By the late 90s.

Tell me we're going to kind of yada yada the last part of this here. Through the dot com period and into the dot com busting. What is the story of openmarket and ultimately what happened to it?

So we did a number of acquisitions. As you point out, when you have a currency, you can now acquire companies. We had a good performance in the fundamentals of the business and I like to say grew into our valuation. We had a peak valuation of $2.5 billion in early 2000, revenue of about $100 million. Crowded market, but still good leadership, good position. And then the dot com bubble burst, as you point out, and the customer base disappeared. All of our customers, many of our customers were new companies that were building storefronts and you know, the Amazons of the world that survived. For every one of them, there were 99 companies that were dot coms that wanted to build the Amazon of X retail category and then a bunch of retailers who put all their plans on hold. Once the market crashed, E Commerce suddenly became nice to have, no longer, must have. And they pushed it all off. And so our revenue completely collapsed. I left the company just before all that happened in January of 2000. So I didn't see the downturn, the dramatic downturn of mid late 2000 and 2001. But the company eventually stock plummeted, revenue plummeted, and the company eventually was acquired by a consolidating software company for. I can't remember the exact number. You may have it in front of you something like $50 million.

Right?

Right.

I actually don't have the exact number, but. So the bottom line is all those.come commerce plays the pets.come of the world. You guys do well for several years they're basically helping them do their thing and then suddenly overnight they're gone. And basically that's the entire business.

Exactly.

Like you said, you left. But thinking of how commerce on the web works now and worked by the time things came back in the Web 2.0 era, was it a case of eventually providing commerce tools was a commodity by the time Web 2.0 comes along, there's so many things that you can just off the shelf use to build a business. Was that what happened to Commerce that by the time the web comes back, you don't need a company like Open Market to create a commerce company?

No. In fact, from the ashes of Open Market and other companies like it, we've seen Shopify explode and is now a $9 billion company. We've seen Demandware explode founded by the former head of Intershop, which was a competitor of ours and that became a $2 or $3 billion company before it was acquired by Salesforce. So Magento has exploded as a platform that ebay eventually acquired and then spun out. And so there's been a ton of next generation, really interesting and valuable e commerce platforms.

Open Market, you're still on the east coast and Open Market was an east coast company. I'm just curious, in terms of the dot com era, what can you tell me about being an east coast company instead of being out in Silicon Valley? Was it a hindrance? Did you feel like you had a different culture than the west coast.

During the mid-90s? It was not obvious that Silicon Valley was going to be 10x Boston the way it is today. And at the time, I don't know, it probably wasn't 50 50, but it was maybe 55, 45, 60, 40. It was pretty close. And we certainly used that to the hilt in talking about the kind of company we were and comparing ourselves to Netscape and there was a flashy consumer company and we're the serious business company and we were the grown ups. And a lot of companies out in the west coast were run by kids. So there was a little bit of that. We were probably more buttoned up and more conservative than many of the companies out west. And that was because our customer base wanted that. When you walk into the banks and the telcos, that's what they wanted to see.

Obviously everyone talks about a PayPal mafia, but I've seen a couple people now mentioned a notion of an open market mafia that so many people came out of that company, you among them that went on to do other things like, you know, found Skyhook, wireless, people like constant contact, things like that. Would you say that it was a similar brain trust of really talented people that went on to great careers?

I don't know if I can compare it to the PayPal mafia. That group is so extraordinary. But we do have an open market mafia and many of the people in that group have done really interesting things. You mentioned a few. Gail Goodman, who took constant contact from nothing to a public company that later sold for a billion dollars, and Chikar Ghosh went on to be founder of another company and then an HBS professor. I think at last count there were 15 or 20 CEOs that can trace their roots to OpenMarket CEOs and founders in the Boston area. So for the Boston community, Open Market was a huge talent magnet in the mid-90s. It was the leading Internet company at a time when the Internet was the thing that a lot of the very talented wanted to participate in. And so we had an amazing talent pool. And those people have gone off to do really interesting things and it's been fun to get together. We do reunions or had for many years. We had reunions every year around Thanksgiving. They petered out a little bit 20 years later, but for 10, 15 years every year we'd all get together and just chat and it was great fun. To this day I still work with and interact frequently with many of my open market colleagues.

We should mention that when you left open market, you founded Upromise, which was also very successful in the early 2000s and still around. Very successful today still. But I think maybe by like 2003, 2004, you joined flybridge at where you are today.

Yeah, I co founded Flybridge in early 2003 and we're an early stage venture capital firm. So I made the conversion from an entrepreneur to becoming a VC in tandem with a couple friends of mine who were previously VCs, one of whom was at Greylock and both of my companies were backed by Greylock. And so it was a very natural transition for me to make.

I like to end with asking people what they're excited about these days. And I'm not asking you specifically what things you're excited about investing in, but we have mentioned crypto and things like that. I'm wondering if some of the things that you saw at Open Market might be some of the things that you see out there that are exciting today.

Yeah, absolutely. I've been spending a lot of time in crypto and blockchain. I've made a couple investments in that space and hope to make more. I think the world of AI and machine learning is very interesting. And at Flybridge, we've done a lot in that area. And the intersection of open source with crypto is very interesting. We were the Series a investors in MongoDB, which is one of the more successful open source enterprise software companies out there that recently went public. So lots of exciting things in that area. And then the other final thing I'll mention is future of work. One of my newer partners was one of the founding team members at WeWork, and he's very excited and we're all very excited about how work is changing and how Millennials and others are reimagining work and life and purpose. So we've made a number of investments in that area as well. So, yeah, there's no shortage of innovation and exciting things going on right now, 20 years later, after the Internet first started to blossom.

Final question, and it might be a bit of an unfair one, but seeing as, Hal, you joined in 95, so you're at the very beginning of commerce on the web and E commerce. If I twisted your arm and made you compare where crypto is today to where e commerce started out, where are we? Are we in 95 in terms of where crypto is, or are we beyond that? Or where do you think we are?

Yeah, I would say it feels like 1995, maybe 1996. It still feels incredibly early, incredibly experimental, super promising, a lot of excitement, but crazy, crazy early still. I mean, just the fundamental infrastructure and plumbing has so much friction around it. If you and I were to get excited about one particular cryptocurrency or project, for example, we have no way of investing in that project unless we jump through a tremendous amount of hoops and expose our capital in very insecure. In a very insecure way, and some foreign entity that we have no control over and has no regulatory framework surrounding it. So the institutional players haven't even stepped in. So it's Very, very early still.

Well, maybe the theme then is feeling around in the dark still to find out what works like we talked about at the beginning.

That's right.

Jeff Busgang, thanks for coming on the show, remembering that and bringing open market out of the memory hole of history as a real pioneer in commerce. Thank you.

Yeah, no, super fun. You know, one side note we didn't mention, but a historical note. We had these original patents I mentioned at the beginning, and Amazon eventually paid us $40 million for licenses and rights to those patents. So whatever professor, MIT professor David Gifford did in 1993 and 1994 ended up being pretty fundamental to the world of E commerce.

Wow. I have never heard that story. Interesting.

Yeah, Amazon felt so vulnerable because the patents were so fundamental to what they do that then seemed like a lot of money and now seems like a pittance to license them.

Well, thanks for that and thanks again for talking to us, Jeff.

Pleasure.

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