Hi, this is Scott Weiss. I'm a general partner here at Indreason Horowitz, and I'm here today with Dan

Serocher, the CEO of Optimizely. I'm also here with Tom Reichert, another partner here at

Indreason Horowitz, who is our enterprise SaaS expert. So we're gathered here today to talk a little

bit about Optimizely. We just completed a $57 million round.

And since I have the founder here, I've always wondered when companies have such a founder

market fit where this idea for Optimizely came from him and his co-founder Pete while they

were at Google, I'd like to just go back and capture that moment at Google.

When did you know that you had to make a company out of the testing and optimization that you

guys are doing as product managers there at Google?

Well, the seed was first planted after I graduated. I was a 23-year-old kid straight out of

school at Google, and I was working with a bunch of engineers

who are twice my age, significantly smarter than me. And one Friday afternoon, I found myself

going in to have to pitch a controversial product idea to the founders of Google, Larry, and

Sergey. And before I went in, I asked one of my mentors for advice about how I

should pitch this controversial product idea. And he gave me some advice that sticks with me to

this day and was actually the first seed that we planted to start optimizantly. And his advice was

to go in and tell them we just want to run an experiment. Just run an experiment. And those magic words transform the conversation

with the founders of Google from a controversial idea to a data-driven idea. It says,

let's run an experiment, let's see what the data shows. And if it's a good idea, it'll prove it out.

And to this day... Who could say no to let's run an experiment? That's right. And actually, then,

you know, that seed actually really grew into a blossom when I left Google to go to the Obama

campaign. And that's where I saw firsthand the distinction between a organization that's a data-driven

...