Klue: Chasing Growth through Failure
When Jason Smith graduated from UBC Sauder, he ranked in the top 1% of the marketing specialization academically. However, the first thing he wished was that he paid more attention to the learnings from class rather than the grades. This intellectual curiosity saw him make a foray into the world of entrepreneurship.
In the wake of the dot-com bubble, Jason embraced his knack for problem solving by creating a web development company to meet the growing demand for websites. He took his skills door to door and offered his service to people in hopes of getting a customer. Jason recounts that the most important thing he learned after university was “Sales — unfortunately, Commerce doesn’t teach you sales.” While applying and adapting his theoretical classroom education to sell his service, he soon realized the cold-hard reality of entrepreneurship.
“There’s euphoria at the beginning… that soon gets met with a trough of disillusion,” he says. “You find yourself staring in the mirror and asking yourself: is entrepreneurship for me?”
It was this sense of failure that became his ultimate driver. He describes the process as if you were being tracked by a mountain lion and succeeding was the only way to evade it. To him, entrepreneurship is an endeavour that makes one “come alive”.
This passion to “come alive” allowed Jason to craft a truly unique story. Immediately after completing his BCom and still in his 20’s, Jason co-founded the aforementioned web development company, Columbus Group. He grew it to over 100 people and it was later acquired by Telus for over $10 million CAD. Jason also became president at VisionCritical, where he grew customer intelligence for the SaaS company from the start-up stage to 500+ employees, $50million+ revenue and 500+ enterprise clients.
He most recently co-founded Klue, a competitive intelligence platform that already serves over 150 customers including Cisco, Tableau, and Shopify. Klue has raised over $25 million CAD from investors including Craft Ventures, OMERS Ventures, Vancouver-based Rhino Ventures, and angel investors including Ryan Holmes (Founder of Hootsuite) and Frederic Kerrest (Co-founder of Okta).
NBR was extremely fortunate to sit down with Jason and learn a bit more about Klue. Jason’s idea for Klue was a long time coming and was inspired by the pain points he experienced in past jobs. His Sales teams struggled to sell their products because of their inability to accurately track what competitors were doing. This hurdle is what prompted him to create Klue.
The product collects and delivers updated and effective competitive intelligence across departments such as Sales, Customer Success, Product, and Executive Teams for every company. These data points — collected from external and internal sources such as Slack, email, and Salesforce — provide companies with more granular and robust market coverage.
Klue leverages the power of machine learning and AI to synthesize that data into competitive insights to deliver smart battle cards: compilations of information about your product, the market, your customers, and your competition. This enables Sales teams to be more efficient and successful. Klue has already proved to be invaluable at the enterprise level: after DELL partnered with Klue, they went from covering 12 companies to over 100 with the same Sales team.
The biggest challenge that the team at Klue has faced so far has been timing. As Jason noted, developing a company based on machine learning and AI is difficult, and it can be very costly. At the same time, he feels his vision for Klue is something the market isn’t quite ready for. At five years in, Jason feels that Klue has only achieved a fifth of its potential.
Jason noted how helpful Klue’s latest funding ($19.7 million CAD) will be in realizing the rest; it is going directly towards accelerating product and machine learning development. He described the venture capital funding process as easier this time because he was returning with a proven record and Klue was seeing strong traction with three years of triple revenue growth. He noted that for students and aspiring entrepreneurs without a proven track record, investors will struggle to look past a team’s quality and unique product if they don’t have a paying client. A company’s traction is a critical metric and the only thing they will invest in if you haven’t built a successful business previously.
Klue’s success so far is a testament to Jason’s work ethic and the early Sales lessons he learned from past entrepreneurial adventures. It’s not a surprise that this has led Jason and his team at Klue to being named Company of the Year — Growth Success by BC Tech at this year’s Technology Impact Awards. In a world that will continue to have both customers and competitors, Klue is defining the competitive enablement side. Jason and the team at Klue are on their way to achieving their mission of empowering companies to win in their competitive arenas and make their competitors “well, quite frankly, eat sand.”
