Positioning a Generative AI Startup: Erik Severinghaus, Founder and CEO of Bloomfilter (Part 1)

Erik discusses his journey as a serial entrepreneur and we deep dive into the Positioning of Bloomfilter.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and what kind of background?

Erik Severinghaus: I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. I grew up in North Carolina, which is in the southeast of the United States. While growing up, I was one of these weird kids who from a very young age was into reading the Wall Street Journal and programming. I taught myself to program in my second grade and was a computer nerd from the moment I discovered them.

I went to high school in North Carolina. I filed my first patent application when I was a sophomore in high school and had my first articles of incorporation probably that same year. I began building businesses from a very young age and then that continued through university and then beyond. I’ve worked in companies large and small.

Sramana Mitra: You studied from the University of North Carolina?

Erik Severinghaus: I did. I went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Sramana Mitra: What timeframe are we talking? When did you finish school?

Erik Severinghaus: I graduated high school in the year 2000, which was well known for the bursting of the tech bubble.

Sramana Mitra: Dot-com crash.

Erik Severinghaus: Yes, I watched the whole run up and was fascinated by it as a kid. Then I watched the whole thing crash and burn. I was one of those people that said, “I love it so much. This is what I was born to do. It’s what I was put on this earth to do.” So I continued to build tech companies, even though there wasn’t any funding. We had to bootstrap and figure it out ourselves with very little capital.

Sramana Mitra: So you studied Computer Science and you’re a hands-on techie.

Erik Severinghaus: So I started in Computer Science and I am very much a hands on, self-taught programmer. I switched my major to Business when I was in the university, but I put myself through school as a programmer. After school, I got a job at IBM as a programmer and as a software developer.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay in IBM?

Erik Severinghaus: I was there for six and a half years.

Sramana Mitra: So that brings us to 2010?

Erik Severinghaus: Yes, that was about 2010. That was when I left IBM to go start another company, which was an AI platform for digital marketing called SimpleRelevance.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, I know. I’ve done the iContact story. You said you went to work for IBM. Does that relate to founding iContact and then going to work for IBM, so help me bridge that.

Erik Severinghaus: Totally. I’m sorry. iContact was in my sophomore year of college. So I worked with Ryan and Aaron to build that through the end of my undergrad. At the end of my undergrad, I had a choice to make. I was running my own startup company called MainBrain, which was an educational software company. I was trying to decide if I wanted to continue in that.

iContact by that point was starting to grow and take off. I could have gone there. The third option was going to IBM for what I call the real job. At that point, I was sort of choosing between those options. For me, it felt like going and learning how big business is done. It was an education that I really wanted. So after undergrad, I went and began a career at IBM.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. Ryan’s building iContact. You went to work for IBM.

Erik Severinghaus: Ryan and Aaron. Ryan was the CEO and Aaron was the chairman. The two of them continued to build iContact. I stayed in touch with them and helped them out. They both remained very good friends of mine, but I went off on my own journey and went to IBM and did some entrepreneurship and kind of starting businesses within IBM focused on computing. After six years or so at IBM, I ended up leaving. It was in the midst of getting my MBA at Kellogg, and I ended up leaving IBM to go start a brand new business, which was called SimpleRelevance.

The idea behind SimpleRelevance was taking a little bit of what I’d learned in the email marketing days with iContact and then applying artificial intelligence in order to target messages and create an offer on an email by email basis.

About 10-15 years ago, before we really had a lot of personalized targeted marketing, most email was all sort of what we call batch and blast. You would just queue up a bunch of messages and send them to everybody on your list.

What we were doing was trying to take a whole bunch of deep, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral information to understand what offers we should target to what people. So that was the sort of marketing automation and personalization platform called SimpleRelevance.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Positioning a Generative AI Startup: Erik Severinghaus, Founder and CEO of Bloomfilter
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