Meet Karim Marucchi, CEO of Crowd Favorite. Watch his interview today!
The Bureau has over 8,000+ orgs of all shapes and sizes, and we all appreciate innovative work and sharing ideas. In this series, the Bureau of Digital’s (BoD) Carl Smith chats with members who make our community happen. This time around, we speak with Karim Marucchi, CEO of Crowd Favorite, a client services firm specializing in enterprise-grade digital strategy and elite Open Source development. Enjoy this cleaned-up, abridged transcript or view the video interview in its entirety.
CARL: HOW DID YOU FIND OUT ABOUT THE BUREAU? HOW DID WE END UP ON YOUR RADAR?
Karim: We both had the pleasure of knowing and spending time with Alex King, the founder of Crowd Favorite. When I started doing business with him, one of the first things he said was, “You have to go to Owner Camp.” So we looked on the calendar, we found the next Owner Camp. That year the event took place in Portland, and that’s where I met you.
CARL: HOW DID YOU AND ALEX MEET?
Karim: We met through the WordPress community and did a little bit of work together, because, you know, his vision of Crowd Favorite was he was going to push the technical limits. Everybody thought it was just a blog, so he went off and did literally all things. At the same time, my team, under another name, was working with Disney - we were building the Disney architecture to convert the entire organization to Open Source. The organization website-wise was moving away from an internal proprietary system, so we helped them architect how to move all of Disney to WordPress over a five-year period. So we started talking and collaborating, and one thing led to another, and it became a conversation about us acquiring his company.
CARL: HOW DID DISNEY RESPOND TO THE IDEA OF TAKING EVERYTHING OPEN SOURCE?
Karim: They spent ten years putting tens of millions of dollars into a lock down system, and the cost of ownership was through the roof, so they asked, “How do we avoid that?” They took a look at three Open Source projects which I helped them sort out, and eventually said they wanted to commit to Open Source. One thing led to another, and within three years of them using Open Source, they started contributing code back to the project. We were part of a big team.
CARL: I WANT TO BACK UP FOR A SECOND BECAUSE I HAVE NO IDEA HOW YOU GOT INTO THIS BUSINESS.
Karim: I started very young as an architect's apprentice. I worked my way through school and graduated with a master's in architecture. The next day I quit architecture and went to work for Autodesk in San Rafael, California.
I was at Autodesk for about a year. It took them about three months to realize, “You're not as good at programming as you think you are, even with your background in architecture. So, we're going to put you on the wish list team and send you around the country with engineers talking about the next versions.”
So I was exposed very quickly not only to the marketing side of software but also to what's coming up and how to translate technology to non-technology people. At the same time, a friend of mine was quitting the Peter Norton group at Symantec to start an internet service provider (ISP) in Los Angeles.
My friend said, “Hey, come hang out between your Autodesk trips,” so I went down to Los Angeles. One afternoon the phone rings while they're out back playing with servers and racks and modems and stuff. He's like, “Hey, can you grab the phone?” Sure thing. I pick it up, and a guy on the other end of the phone says, “Yeah, hi, my name is Jim from Porter Novelli. We're looking in the yellow pages for companies that do web pages. Could you build us a web page?” Being the smart ass I am, I answered a question with a question. I said, “Who's the client?” He responded it was Nissan. So I said, “Well, of course, we do web pages!”
There are two problems with that statement. One, I didn't work there, and two, I had no idea that an ISP didn't make web pages at the time. I just figured it was all the same thing.
Still, I set an appointment with this guy for the next week. When I get off the phone, I go over to my friends and say, “Hey, good news. I got you a project.” I told them, “This company called up, you know, Porter Novelli. You must have heard of them; they're pretty big. They want to build a web page for Nissan.”
They were like, “But we don't know how to build web pages.”
Long story short, they said, “You're showing up to the meeting, buddy.” So a month later, I quit my job at Autodesk and started building web pages. That was 25 years ago.
CARL: SO YOU WERE KIND OF A TRANSLATOR. YOU HELPED PEOPLE UNDERSTAND WHAT WAS GOING ON. THEN THIS RANDOM THING HAPPENS AND SUDDENLY YOU’RE BUILDING WEB PAGES FOR NISSAN?
Karim: And then it was just one client after the other. We got in with a couple of PR firms, then agencies, and it was all enterprise clients. It was crazy, and that's what brought us to the big show in the late 90s. We were one of Los Angeles’ first web shops at the time.
CARL: SO, YOU’RE RUNNING CROWD FAVORITE NOW. WHAT DO YOU DO ONCE YOU GET TO THAT POSITION OF BEING IN WORD PRESS?
Karim: That little web shop we started got sucked up into USWeb CKS, so I went from working with 10 people to working with 9,000 people and then WPP came along and said, we want you to start a company. That went public on the Italian stock exchange. We took more VC money and it was iterations of learning what not to do when starting a website. It was the wild west. By the beginning of the 2000s, I wanted to do something that was just fun, without the hypergrowth, and that is when I started what would become Crowd Favorite.
I always admired Open Source, and I wanted to “put my money where my mouth is,” so I wondered how we could bring Open Source to these clients. And I realized Open Source is so advanced, so in 2006, in the baby days of word press, I started a new agency that would provide websites to small businesses. The problem was I had years of experience in the enterprise, but I never sold to an SMB. Small business kicked my ass. SMBs tanked me, and I immediately went back to the enterprise because I didn’t understand how to be successful.
We’re at a moment for enterprises where you have two choices if you want something more robust than a marketing site. These days it is a digital experience platform - a DXP. People have been trying to cram so many things into a CMS it’s gotten ridiculous. Over the last three years, the back ends of the WordPress sites we have created are custom. I believe there’s an opportunity for us to say what’s next for Open Source in the enterprise and show how we bring the best of Open Source and the best of SaaS together, so they’re not competing anymore - they’re working together.
The future is about the user experience and the experience for the editor. That is where some of our projects and partners are cutting edge. They manage content for the page or news article and also marketing and KPIs. And that affects a workflow that brings in a webpage, marketing, live event content - and I can manage that as a workflow rather than keeping everything in separate interfaces.
CARL: THE MOMENT WE LAUNCHED MEMBERSHIP YOU ALL JUMPED IN AND I JUST WANT TO THANK YOU FOR THAT!
Karim: You have to know that part of the Bureau comes into every single one of our conversations internally. My partner, Jason Rosenbaum, is addicted to the Bureau Slack channels - in a good way. It has been our pleasure to be a part of this community. We have made so many close friends in the community, clients and partners.
Want to hear more? Check out the full video here. To be part of an awesome community of experts like Karim, join the Bureau today!