Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms (Part 1)

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Sramana Mitra: All right, Justin, let’s start at the very beginning of your entrepreneurial journey. Where are you from? Where were you born? Raised? What kind of background?

Justin Grooms: I was born in the East Bay Area in Walnut Creek. My family was in the semiconductor industry. When I was very young, we moved down to San Diego, which was the hotbed of the semiconductor industries, especially back in the the eighties and nineties.

I grew up in San Diego, went to college at UC San Diego, had a great time there, did what a lot of people that are interested in tech and entrepreneurship in that part of California do – I went and worked for Qualcomm.

I was there for a period of time working on the technology licensing team, learning how to develop intellectual property and find ways to commercialize that. Qualcomm has tens and tens of thousands of patents that they work on, and it was such an amazing education in recognizing how valuable it is to develop technology and then to to find applications.

Qualcomm sent me to grad school at UC Irvine, where I got my MBA, and from there I guess the rest was just a series of trying to build things and grow things.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you come out of your graduate program?

Justin Grooms: That was 2008.

Sramana Mitra: So, 2008, which was the financial crisis year.

Justin Grooms: That’s exactly right. It was a great time to do something just silly. I left the program that I was in and went to a fast growth defense contractor called Datron down in the San Diego area.

Datron was an amazing innovator in point-to-point communication systems. I ran an advanced technology group that developed and commercialized high-tech secure communication systems for use in high reliability environments, whether it be government or commercial. I just became fascinated with the concept of not only security but also the reliability and communication systems. I was excited about how important it was to be able to operate in different types of conditions and to know how to develop things that are not only innovative and pushing the limits on what people believe physics can support in a certain environment, or what can economically be developed and deployed.

At the same time, you always know that you’re working on a system that must always work. This is not a consumer-facing game. It seems mission critical stuff that people are impacted in very meaningful ways if your system doesn’t work, but then at the same time you’re expected to be developing something that’s just on the bleeding edge of technology. What an amazing education, frankly.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at Datron?

Justin Grooms: It might have been about seven or eight years. During that period from 2008 through 2016, Datron was one of America’s biggest defense contractors. It was a really hybrid company doing some innovative stuff.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms
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