Jody Glidden’s a lifelong entrepreneur. As a kid, he capitalized on the Bruce Lee rage, making nunchucks from broomsticks in his dad’s workshop that he sold to schoolmates. One day, there was a knock on the door.
“It was the police who said to my mother, ‘Do you realize your son is selling weapons at school?’ I hadn't really thought of it that way,” Jody says from Miami, where he lives. “But that was the end of my first business.”
He’s come a long way from those early days in Miramichi. As my guest on episode 24 of the TechTalks podcast, Jody shares his story, charting the path to his post as CEO of Introhive. The New Brunswick CRM software company recently raised a record $100 million US in funding for the largest equity investment in the province’s history.
A Winding Road
Jody’s path was a crooked one. An early computer enthusiast, he started programming in elementary school. After graduation, struggling at UNB where he was taking computer science, he got busy getting a record number of Microsoft certifications. This caught the attention of the founders of Scholars.com, a Fredericton company that built one of the world's first large-scale collaborative web software products.
At Scholars, Jody oversaw a large and growing technical team. His star was rising, but, by the time the company was acquired, he wanted more.
“I remember at the time feeling like that wasn't enough,” he says. “Why don't I have my own company?”
He was 22 or 23.
Looking back, “it seems ridiculous that at that age I felt like that wasn't enough,” he says. But he was young and confident, and he pushed onward. He started his own company, icGlobal, which exposed him to other sides of the business: finance, accounting, HR, and, especially, sales, from pipeline management to prospecting.
This shift from the development side of things to leading and growing a company was its own education in how to be a CEO that would serve him well.
Go West, Young Man
When icGlobal was acquired, Jody relocated to San Francisco, where he got his first taste of Silicon Valley.
By his late 20s, he decided it was time to head back to school. After getting his BBA back at UNB, he then enrolled in Harvard’s Master’s in Management Information Systems, which teaches a mix of software engineering and software management practices. At the same time, he joined the sales team at Chalk Media to gain practical experience. Jumping into a sales role was not the expected path most would have expected Jody to take.
“And, oh my god, that job was hard,” Jody says. “It was way harder than I expected. You're just getting hung up on constantly.”
He kept at it, ultimately getting promoted to COO and CTO, the role he held when it was sold to Blackberry, where Jody eventually found himself reporting directly to Jim Balsillie.
Through all the shifts in his career, tenacity and perseverance are the enduring themes in Jody’s story.
“I feel like if you put in the effort that 99% of people won't do, then you might have a shot at the rewards that 1% of people get.”
The Introhive Buzz
When he was at Blackberry, Jody started to see a big opportunity in optimizing sales.
“I always kept this little book with different ideas for what my next startup might be,” he says. “At a certain point, l just thought the time was right to go after this category.”
Jody co-founded Introhive in Fredericton in 2012. He’d come back to New Brunswick for the software talent, bringing everything he’d learned along the way about sales, and the gaps in the CRM software market, with him.
Today, Introhive has more than 300 staff, more than half in its Atlantic Canadian offices in Saint John, Fredericton and Halifax, the rest in London, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco and Toronto. Its software is used in some 90 countries, a ten-fold increase from just two years ago. Introhive’s key differentiator–an uncommon focus on customer retention and client happiness–is fueling its expansion.
“We call our formula the three Rs: revenue, retention and relationships,” Jody says. “If you have all three of those dialed in, you're going to drive revenue to a level that you couldn't before.”
Going Big
Introhive has successfully fundraised in the past, but for its latest Series C round, the stakes were so high they decided to work with an investment bank. They chose Bank of America, which helped Introhive hone its story, which it circulated to potential investors.
“There was silence for about two weeks,” Jody says. “We wondered if they were actually doing anything.”
They were.
The meetings began soon after with potential investors, with Introhive ultimately choosing Providence Strategic Growth as its lead investor. There’s some local money in the $100-million mix, too, from the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation (NBIF), as well as the BDC.
“I was really happy to get the support of some Canadian investors,” Jody says, “because I really think Canada should be a part of this story going forward, not just in the past.”
The new money will fuel small acquisitions and new hires in sales, marketing and engineering.
“We're trying to figure out the fastest we can grow organically,” he says. And that takes money–and big thinking.
Jody uses a thought exercise he learned from Marcel LeBrun, a New Brunswick tech sector leader: instead of aiming for, say, doubling growth, think: what is stopping us from getting to five times growth?
“By setting the bar really high, it brings those points out,” Jody says. “It makes it more obvious so you know what problems you should look at.”
Setting the bar high is nothing new to Jody. He’s leading by example, showing what can happen en route from Miramichi to Silicon Valley, Boston, Miami and beyond, but always with one foot firmly planted here in New Brunswick.
As Jody says, the software business is limitless, unconstrained by the supply chain and geography.
“That's why tech companies are some of the fastest-growing in the world, because they're the most scalable,” Jody says. “And that just creates a lot of fun.”
Fun indeed! To check out our entire conversation, click here to listen.
Here's a peek at some of the highlights from this episode:
[05:28]: We start by talking about Jody’s early ventures as a kid in Miramichi.
[18:00]: Jody talks about the real-world learning of starting his own company.
[31:34]: Chalk Media and Jody’s crash course in sales.
[37:08]: We talk about what it takes to rise to the top.
[43:45]: Jody on the talent pool in Fredericton and New Brunswick’s advantages.
[54:46]: Jody’s history of pitching to investors and what he’s learned along the way.
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