When Larry Kim started WordStream in 2007, he was running it as a marketing consulting business out of a local Panera Bread. To help him with his job, Kim programmed software that would identify keywords that would better position websites for paid and organic search results.
“The big aha moment was shortly after that: Perhaps this could be a product that could be sold to thousands of businesses rather than just using it myself,” Kim recently told me.
"I envision this is what parents must feel like when their kids go off to college."
Fast-forward to now, and Wordstream is a fast-growing, profitable tech company that employs over 200 people with a headquarters in the Prudential Center. For the last four years, the company has made it into the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private U.S. companies, with triple-digit, three-year sales growth that has allowed it operate without any taking any outside capital since 2014.
But after running the company for nearly ten years, Kim said he is stepping down as CTO and leaving the company he founded behind to start a new venture. Kim’s last day at WordStream was on Thursday, though he will remain with the company as a board member.
“I envision this is what parents must feel like when their kids go off to college,” Kim said.
For Kim, the timing was right to leave and start something new.
“You don’t ever want to leave if things aren’t going great,” he said, but that was far from the case for WordStream, which is on a “strong predictable trajectory for the foreseeable future.”
Kim’s new startup is called MobileMonkey and while he’s not divulging too many details on it right now, he said it's in the mobile marketing space and will involve chatbots and artificial intelligence. To help him get started, he has enlisted Jason O’Hare, a former vice president of sales at WordStream who was most recently at BlueConic.
One key lesson he took away from WordStream, Kim said, is that converting companies into customers through mobile channels is “broken,” which his new company will try to address through the use of chatbots and AI.
“I think they have pretty transformative qualities,” he said.
MobileMonkey already has 40 customers, Kim said, and he’s now in the process of raising a Series A financing round. Kim said people can sign up to get updates on his new venture here.
Looking back at his time at WordStream, Kim said “it’s been an incredible journey.”
“I have a lot of gratitude for the people who worked for the company, the employees, the customers and the investors who believed in this,” he said.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that WordStream was founded in 2008.
