Tech startups are a bit like sports and music. There are some pathways to success that seem more well-tread than others.
Athletes often come through a marquee program, say North Carolina basketball, and musicians often emerge from local scenes that have already developed a reputation.
And if you bring that theme to the Austin startup ecosystem, you could say a pedigree that includes Trilogy and Bazaarvoice is one of those things that portends future wins. Both companies were foundational successes at key points along Austin's tech and startup boom. And both have churned out new founders from their ranks.
Now, you could say that data.world, a data sharing platform and social network founded by Bazaarvoice founder Brett Hurt, has claimed a critical mass of alums from those companies as it chases an almost endless market of enterprise scale businesses, startups and news organizations that want better ways to take advantage of data.
The latest addition at data.world is Ryan Cush, who recently joined as chief revenue officer.
Cush worked closely with Hurt and fellow data.world co-founders Matt Laessig and Jon Loyens at Bazzarvoice. And he worked with Loyens and fellow data.world co-founder Bryon Jacob at Trilogy back in 1999.
Cush told me that Bazaarvoice attracted a lot of Trilogy alumni, which was critical for the company's growth, and now several are back working together with Cush at data.world.
"We have some amazing engineers that came from Trilogy," he said. "We have some of the very, very best engineers, I would posit, in the world."
Cush said a culture of trust has carried on throughout each team members' journey to data.world -- and they share a bit of grit, too.
For example, Cush remembers back in Bazaarvoice's formative years -- long before its 2012 IPO -- that he and Hurt would share hotel rooms as they traveled the country developing new business.
“The cool thing about it is that there’s this shared trust and this shared experience we’ve had together," he said. "We know how certain team structures work and how certain dynamics work.”
Whether having key team members together on the company's executive team leads to the big exits that Bazaarvoice, CoreMetrics and Trilogy experienced remains unknown. But I got a relatively rare opportunity to read one of Hurt's letters to investors that might give you a sense of his confidence.
"Quite simply, Ryan is the best guy I’ve ever worked with in sales - at either Coremetrics or Bazaarvoice," Hurt wrote to data.world investors. "He was by far one of our top performers over the years at Bazaarvoice and set the standard for our culture as well."
Hurt said that it was clear Cush would be key in taking the company to the next level, and he noted that he was on a vacation with his wife when he heard Cush had accepted the job.
"...I couldn’t have been more thrilled," he wrote. "Those are the moments that you’ll always remember in the history of a startup."
He capped the letter saying he's honored to work "alongside the best early-stage team I’ve ever been a part of."
