In this episode of The Bear Roars, Dan sits down with Ed Hallen — co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Klaviyo, the company he and Andrew Bialecki started in 2012 and took public in 2023. Before they had an idea, they had a rule: find a problem, solve it with software, and get someone to pay by credit card within two months, or move on. It took four or five tries.
What they sold was email marketing. What they were actually building was the customer data underneath it. Ed's argument is that the constraint on AI isn't the models — it's that most companies still can't say what a customer or a lead actually is. His answer is "highly opinionated" data, where a purchase means a purchase at every brand and there's nothing left for anyone to debate. He and Andrew ran the company as just the two of them for three years, hit $250,000 in revenue in year two and a million in year three, and raised money they left sitting in the bank untouched.
Ed came to Boulder in 2016 planning to stay two months, and bought a house four months later. A decade on, what keeps him here is that it's a place where people build real things instead of telling great stories about them. Plus his second company, Team Engine, why he thinks public markets make companies better, and his answer to Dan's most provocative question: did any of this actually do good in the world?
Learn more about Ed's work: https://www.klaviyo.com
Order Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/book
To nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: contact@loudbearproductions.com