The Kibo Commerce Chronicle with Ram Venkataraman

In episode 26 of Retail Checks and Balances, Kevin Spencer interviews Ram Venkataraman, CEO of Kibo Commerce, to discuss his journey in the retail and hospitality industry. Ram discusses his background, experience, and the transformation he led at Kibo during the COVID-19 pandemic.

TIMESTAMPS

[00:03:20] Building Things was Fascinating.

[00:04:36] Platform-Based Businesses.

[00:08:40] Embracing Composable Commerce Strategy.

[00:12:30] Embracing Client Obsession for Success.

[00:16:11] Core Product Solutions.

[00:19:13] Optimizing Fulfillment Logistics.

[00:24:16] Work-Life Balance Insights.

[00:25:44] Measuring Success Through Mentoring.

QUOTES

• "So as an individual and as a business, I think one of the key things for us is that curiosity, learning new things, trying new things, obviously being in the software business, you have to constantly innovate.” - Ram Venkataraman
• "And it's not an easy thing today to be successful without a lot of effort, without a lot of feedback around you to really get the right feedback to improve yourself and improve yourself as an organization." - Ram Venkataraman

SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS

Kevin Spencer

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kspencer007/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinspencer007/

Ram Venkataraman

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramvenkataraman/

WEBSITE

Rod Plus Solutions: https://rodplussolutions.com/

Kibo Commerce: https://kibocommerce.com/

Transcript

Welcome to Retail Checks and Balances, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the bustling world of commerce and culinary delights to help you grow your business and win. Join us as we explore the fascinating stories, trends, and challenges that shape the retail and hospitality industry, from cozy corner cafes to sprawling shopping malls and everything in between. And now, here's your host, Kevin Spencer.

Welcome again to Retail Checks and Balances. We have a very special guest today. He's CEO of Kibo Commerce, Mr. Ram Venkatraman. Welcome. Thank you, Kevin. So to start off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and the journey to where you are today?

Kevin Spencer

Yeah. Thank you, Kevin, for having me on the show. Again, my name is Ram Venkatraman. I'm the CEO of Kibo Commerce. I've been here at Kibo for the last six odd years. I joined this business in 2018 as the chief product technology officer, and then went through a fair amount of transformation through the COVID time. I'll tell a little bit more about Kibo in a minute here. And then I took over as CEO in October of 2022. So I've been here in this role for about 18 months or so. I can talk to you a little bit about how I came to this role as CEO. So I'm originally from India, obviously trained as an engineer like a lot of us in India are when they first get going. So I'm an electronics engineer by training. Worked in a lot of different roles in engineering in the early days. Started my own company in 2000 as a software company right after the dot-com crash. I had a brilliant idea of starting another software company. And then we grew that until about 27. We sold it off to another software business. And I realized I couldn't be a technologist all my life and decided to go in and work at Red Hat as a product manager. I used to work for a company called JBoss that Red Hat acquired. And then that started my journey into a leadership roles over different periods of time, worked in engineering for a while, worked as a CTO for a couple of companies. And prior to joining Kibo, I was the CTO of the payments platform at NCR, ran payments for them globally for both retail and hospitality. So, you know, think about As if you've, if your audiences are familiar with NCR, they do pretty much every retailer in the United States. I call them tier zero retailers and then aren't even tier one retailers. And then a lot of restaurants and gas stations and gas pumps. We didn't, we did payments for all of them. So anything that NCR plus was there, or sometimes even when NCR plus was not there, we did payments for them.

Ram Venkataraman

Right. What would you say kind of inspired you to this point or this feel of profession as we call it?

Yeah, in terms of if you talk about just from a product perspective, I always love to build stuff, right? I think that was one of the things. Building things was fascinating to me even as a a young child and a young person. So that kind of got me started wanting to be an engineer. I started my engineering career in the hardware space, not even in the software space. And then I quickly realized growing up in India that, you know, there was as much fun, if not more fun in the software world than in the hardware world. And decided to kind of make that shift there. And then, you know, been always in software companies, right? I think that was one of the things, a lot of people choose different paths in their journey to software, some work in the services field, some work in kind of, you know, building other solutions on top of it. I love building, you know, core platforms per se. And so if you look at my trajectory, I worked in, you know, horizontal software companies like JBoss and Red Hat, worked in vertical software companies in education and fintech and mortgage tech. They're all platform based businesses. So that's what I've always enjoyed. You know, here at Kibo, we do the same thing. You know, we build e-commerce, order management and subscription platforms for retailers, B2C, B2B brands, and D2C brands, right? So that's kind of the, that's what kind of inspired me per se in terms of wanting to build products and platforms. And that's really what I've done most of my career.

Buzzword for me is innovation and anybody who wants to be part of innovation to change the world as they say, right? Yeah. Let's talk about Kibo. Tell us about Kibo. Tell us, you know, what's the amazing stuff of Kibo.

Yeah, Kibo was originated in 2016, and Vista Equity Partners, they're one of the largest PE firms in the world in terms of only focused on B2B enterprise SaaS businesses, right? So they had a great idea in 2016. It's like the world is evolving. The large retailers and the large brands are able to build their own custom in-house. Hey, how do we build an end-to-end platform for mid-market retailers to the lower end of the enterprise? So think about somebody doing $25, $30 million online to $1 billion online, kind of in that range. How do you build them a platform that does e-commerce, order management? personalization and subscription right i think those are the kind of the core ideas that they had and we want to build something really modern so they acquired a bunch of companies right took all the investment from that you know really looked at the ideas that those guys were building on and kind of we went through this journey of rebuilding all of this so when i joined the business in 2018 we rebuilt the platform right before COVID came along and kind of delivered one of the most modern commerce platforms in the market today, right? Whether it's, you know, specific e-commerce capabilities. And I assume your audience fully understands e-commerce. I think the e-commerce is before the checkout button and then order management comes in when you hit the checkout button. And then subscription is for businesses that do kind of recurring orders per se. And it's interesting, we do both B2C and B2B a lot, both for subscription perspectives. Some B2B businesses call it recurring orders, some B2Cs obviously stand on subscription. So really exciting time, lots of growth in this space, tons of businesses are going through this transformation journey at this point and kind of re-platforming and kind of building this in a modern composable way so the buzzword obviously in commerce these days is composable in terms of you know not buying all of these things from one vendor finding the best of breed, building the solutions together, building the right types of SIs to come in to kind of stitch together the right solution that makes sense for those clients. So it's exciting time today in terms of what we offer for the business and a lot of customers that are using our capabilities.

So when we talk about, you know, Give me some, what were your thing, what were the greatest achievements of Kibo, you know, from post-pandemic, and now as we, in the endemic. Tell me how that roadmap is going to go.

Yeah, so great question, right? So before the pandemic came along, we believed in this world of, hey, Kibo's commerce platform, you know, is going to be, customers are going to buy all the pieces from us. They're going to buy e-commerce, order management, point of sale, personalization, and there's going to be this one big suite-based approach. So if you look at, historically, how customers have purchased software, even before Salesforce and Adobe, the IBM's world, and the SAP world, everybody bought all of these things from big brands. Right when pandemic came along, this composable story came along. So we had to really change in how we looked at the world. So we built our platform in a very composable way, but we wouldn't talk to the market in a very composable way. So through the pandemic, We started slowly pivoting over. We actually sold part of the businesses that we had in terms of saying, hey, we're no longer a personalization business. We're going to be focused on 100% in just in digital commerce and commerce specifically around e-commerce and OMS and subscriptions. So that was a big change for us in terms of everywhere. And then as we pivoted towards the post-pandemic era, right? Another big pivot that we had to go through was Kibo was a very, you know, we'll sell our software, we will implement our software, we know how to do it ourselves, right? One of the big realizations that we were going through in the post-pandemic phase is that we need to really work with the ecosystem, right? Tech partners, partners and SI ecosystem, value-added resellers, right? How do we actually work with the larger ecosystem to make that happen? And that may be a thing that Other businesses really did well before, but we hadn't done well, right? So for us, it was like we had to go through this big process of innovation inside the organization, really relearn how to work with a larger ecosystem of vendors today. So today we have a large pool of SIs that we work with, a large pool of tech partners that we work with. You're part of the Mock Alliance, which I don't know if all of you from your audience understand. Mock Alliance is a group of vendors that all have come together to define what the future state of composable commerce looks like, right? So they're all microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native platform, and really prescribe the headless architecture, right? So we're 100% cloud-based, we're on Google and AWS. So it's a fascinating journey that we've been through.

OK, so you're talking about like an advisory board that really pivots where we need to go as a collective unit, correct?

Yes, it is. It's more than an advisory board. It is actually a consortium of vendors that has a very strong governance process and that vets every vendor that gets into that alliance. So you've got a fair amount of vetting that goes through. Is your architecture the right? If you're a technology vendor, they bring a group of SIs to validate you because those SIs are actually implementing your software. If it's an SI, they bring a bunch of vendors to validate the SI to say that they have the technical capabilities to do it. So it's more than just, hey, it's a tick mark. It's very difficult. It takes six to nine months to get into the mock alliance. So it's not for everybody. And not every customer in the world would want to go use the mock approach. It's a fair amount of effort it takes to future-proof your business. Mock's all about future-proofing the architecture, future-proofing your business. That way, I don't have to replatform every six months or every six years or every... Like, hey, I don't like this promotion engine. I want to buy another promotion engine. While in the old days, it'd be like, I got to re-platform the whole thing to get a new promotion engine. So it loosely couples all these different pieces and allows you to constantly innovate in your enterprise, right? So if it's a retailer trying to change things over a period of time, they can easily do it.

Okay. So I have a two-part question. Sure. What are some of the challenges you've faced Whether you see your career at Kibo and you know, how have you overcome them? And you know, what's the most important lesson you've learned along the way?

Yeah, I think the key thing, I think for me personally, and it's probably the same thing. I'm a first time CEO. Right. So Kibo, so I'm learning how to be a CEO. I think one of the things that, you know, we have our core values, right? We call three core values in our business, which is obviously trust is a non-negotiable thing, but it's difficult in this market to even realize in the industry, there's a lot of companies that really don't embrace that concept of developing trust, not only externally, but internally within your employee base. Growth mindset is another key aspect. We all make mistakes. Despite our best efforts, we will make mistakes. It's about providing the right type of feedback and learning from it. And then obviously, it goes without saying, client obsession. We're really obsessed about it. One of the very high client retention rates comes because we're really obsessed about our customers. As a person and as a company, I think one of the things that we've tried to embrace within the organization is this notion of being very curious, right? So as a individual and as a business, I think one of the key things for us is that curiosity, learning new things, trying new things, obviously being in the software business, you have to constantly innovate, right? So I've gone through numerous challenges in my career as I have made transitions from being a tech person to partly tech and partly business person and today mostly business person. It's every step of the way. The step change is pretty high, right? Is necessarily you have to put a lot of effort into it. It doesn't look sometimes people make it look easy, but there's a ton of effort that goes behind it. And it starts from wanting to go learn these things. I think a lot of people expect it to come very easily. It doesn't come easily. Even as Kibo, we've gone through a lot of struggles. Again, as a business today, we felt that we had a great platform, but the market wasn't embracing us for a long time. platform that was built on legacy technology. We had to put a lot of effort in convincing the market. It's not done for us today. We're still working on this very hard. So there's a lot of grit that goes into it. And it's not an easy thing today to be successful without a lot of effort, without a lot of feedback around you to really get the right feedback to improve yourself and improve yourself as an organization. So a bunch of things that go in. It's nothing rocket science, I would say, in terms of what it is. It's the same building blocks that probably your parents taught you when you were a kid, in terms of wanting to be curious, wanting to work very hard and not giving up. But those are the kind of basic building blocks that I've used in my career. And then the other thing I would say is that surrounding yourself with the right types of mentors, I've been lucky in terms of learning from the right people, you know, and getting the right feedback from them at the right time. So lots and lots of mentors, obviously, along the way, I still maintain a large group of mentors, both from a business perspective, as well as from a personal perspective. And as a company, we embrace a lot of other things, we have a partner advisory board that helps us, we have a customer advisory board that gives us feedback in terms of saying where do we go. So it's ultimately a lot about feedback, taking that feedback and constantly trying to improve yourself.

You just took my next question away from me, but that's great. What was the question? Let me hear it. Advisories, you know, who advises you? Yeah, there's a ton of people, ton of people. Yes. Great. And, you know, one of the things, in terms of the current e-commerce technology and the landscape of your product innovation. I guess if you can tell us, you know, what are your workhorse products? What do people reach out and say, I want this, I want this. Could you give us some insights in terms of what that is?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So people, most people who come to us You know, think of it as from, you know, we were talking before the store started on omni-channel or unifying customer experiences. When we build our core DNA of the product is about how do we deliver best in quality commerce experiences. And I use the word commerce, I don't use the word e-commerce, but across any channel, right? It could be, you know, online, it could be mobile, it could be in store, it could be a call center, wherever it is. How do you improve that customer experience for, you know, for our clients, right? In terms of their customers, right? And so we think about it in our own world. We think about bringing three core solutions that They're typically point solutions in the past, big monoliths in the past. And the three things we think about it is e-commerce, order management, and subscriptions. And as we think about that, it's usually a lot of times when you think about buying experiences, I search for a product, I don't know if the product is available or not in the store. If I go there, is it there, really there, not there? Is the price right? Are there better promotions if I call in versus going to the store versus online? How do you simplify these experiences across all of this? Or let's say it's out of stock, right? But maybe there is a, you know, furniture available, I'm buying furniture and there's a, you know, sofa coming on a boat from China in three weeks. Can I sell that ahead of time, right? Can I, can you be confidently tell me, hey, this product will be available on this day and it'll be definitely fulfilled to you on this time. You still see tons and tons of experience, very poor customer experiences, right? And so as we think about the business, we think about how do we drive better customer experiences for our clients. And that really usually starts with a lot of inventory visibility that is there in the network. How do you expose that to the front end of the commerce channel? Make sure the pricing is consistent, whether it's in-store, online, or in a call center, right? So when we think about unified experiences, it's about unifying the data across all of these things and putting the customer in the center of it, right? So we've built it, we've got a ton of proof points around it. Some large customers like our Ace Hardware use our platform, they use it in all their 5,000 plus stores online, as well as their order management capabilities that fulfill within 15 minutes. So a tremendous amount of proof points in terms of what we can do, solve.

So question for me would be, as you just sparked my interest is that from the commerce side, we're not calling it e-commerce, we're calling it commerce. Yes. And that order is placed. I guess you have that integration to inject into any POS that order and get it fulfilled throughout that whole end to end.

Yeah, so a lot of times what will happen is that a couple of couple of things that we do, right? You buy something, you say you want to pick it up in store. How does that fulfillment happen? So we solve for customers, three or four core use cases, and we think about fulfillment, right? In a BOPIS, if you have customers listening abroad, it's used for click and collect there, right? And then the other big use case, ship to home. But where do you ship it from? Let's say you have ASA's 23 different distribution centers. What's the right place to ship it? Do I optimize on shipping costs? Do I optimize on labor costs? Do I optimize on margin? Let me find the right place to ship it from so you get it in the time I promised you. But what if it's not there? in that one place where all the products would have to split that thing between a warehouse and a store. What if it is a store that I can ship it from that is closest to my house? Do I leverage that inventory in there? So we can do all of those optimizations easily. But now let's take the store example that you asked for. You buy something, you buy a pair of shoes, you walk into the store, is that happening in the point of sale or is it happening outside the point of sale? So we've integrated with point of sale experiences to say, okay, inject that order into the point of sale and fulfill like you've asked. Some customers will say, I wanted the same point of sale. I wanted the point of sale, the same pricing and promotion. So the point of sale may hook into our platform and say, hey, tell me the price that you're offering. Let's make sure. What's the inventory position? Can I beat this buzzword in the industry extended aisle? I don't have it in the store. You walk into the store and say, I want to buy that red shoes, but it's actually available in a warehouse, I can ship it to you, Mr. Customer, right? Or Mrs. Customer, right? So those types of experiences we can power very easily with our platform.

Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. So what would you say from, and this is a question about you, you know, in terms of your, your habits and routines, what that has contributed to your success? What would you tell somebody? I'm not asking for the secret sauce, but you can, if you can.

No, I don't have any secret sauce. That's the reality of it. I spent a lot of time, I guess, I think already, I'm very, very curious as a person. I read a lot. I was telling somebody I probably spend several thousand dollars a year buying books and reading. I am a voracious reader and listener in many cases on lots of different topics. It's one of those things and you never know when you think about innovation or you're trying to solve a problem where the ideas come from. And then it's also building a network of people you work with. I think it's not all things are You don't have all the answers. You got to build the right type of people around you from a team perspective, as well as people who can help you. I think that's another part of it. We talked a little bit about it in terms of how people advise you. And a lot of times I always say you have to give to the community and give to the people. So I spend a lot of time mentoring others in terms of helping them, growing them. in terms of whatever I know. And it's amazing what you learn when you think you're mentoring somebody, you learn something back from them so much more easily because it's a system where you think you're giving, but in many cases, you're learning from these people you're trying to help. So it's a fascinating, I don't think there's one solve here for all of this. That's the way I think about it is like, I spend a lot of time working on my own stuff. I learn from others and I help others.

So let's jump into to you a bit. Let's talk about your hobbies. I guess you just said you're a reader. I am a reader. Yeah. I used to play a lot of sports when I was young. You said you spend $1,000 on books. Is that your only hobby? Do you have time for anything else?

Yeah, I know there's a, there is a, obviously the, in these days, the time is obviously very limited. Time management is the most important thing. So family obviously is the first priority for me. I have three kids and they're all growing up and leaving home, but they still, you're still fairly plugged in into their lives and what they're doing. And then obviously once that's a key priority, self-help, obviously taking care of yourself is a probably higher priority these days and some days as your stress and work levels and workload levels increase. And then obviously the rest of the time is you know, reading, traveling, those types of things. I'm not a, used to be a big, you know, person who spent a lot of time with sports in the past, but not as much these days, really focused more on doing what I need to do to take care of myself as well as take care of the family.

So how do you, how do you maintain the work life balance? Yes.

I don't know, I think it's a misnomer. You try really hard. I don't know whether I've figured it out, to be honest with you. Work-life balance in so many ways. If you talk to people who work with me, I'm always working. I would say I need to learn from somebody else. Maybe another speaker on your podcast can teach me. I'm fairly an intense human being in terms of pursuing something and trying to figure it out. I usually don't give up until it's solved. And that's one of the things that I try. The best thing I can solve for is not drive that same level of intensity across the whole organization or the teams I work with to make sure I give them the space they need But I haven't really figured it out, frankly. Work-life balance is not something that I have solved for throughout my entire career. I tell my kids to find it. I haven't figured it out. It's complicated. It's complex. Have you solved for it? Can I ask a question about you? Have you figured it out?

To a point, and if you look at one of my podcasts, I kind of talked about the longevity of a view as a leader and delegation. So those are two key words that I have been able to, to adapt to in the last, I would say two, three years, because, um, you know, as a leader, sometimes you realize you're doing too much transactional stuff and you don't need to delegate and, the biggest challenge when you delegate at first is that you got to be open to somebody making a mistake. You know, you don't want to scold them. You want to kind of guide them. They're going to get to you and you don't have to take it back over because they're making a mistake. So that's, I've been able to free up some time with that. I'm also into family per se. So, you know, It's complex, but you can do it. I think you can do it. You look very easygoing and I think you can do it. You just have to plan it. It doesn't happen overnight.

I appreciate that feedback. Thank you.

I'll definitely keep that in mind. The other thing I would would like to ask is, you know, and this is a big one is, what do you hope your legacy will be in your field? You know, how do you measure success in your work?

Yeah, I've been asked this question and I have a very standard answer. I measure it through the people I I am able to partake whatever little I know I've learned in my career, whether it's obviously sharks with my children. And then I always tell people, the way I measure it is how many CTOs and CPOs and those types of guys I've been able to bring up through whatever experience and knowledge that I've shared. So that's that's the only way I measured it. I don't measure it any way in any other way professionally because ultimately what you know today is we all become ancient pretty fast in our in our field. You know it's not as much as there is technology getting legacy we get legacy pretty fast and I can feel that very quickly even I can understand technology at a fairly detailed level today, but I don't know what's going to happen with this quantum world that's going to come in the next 10, 15 years. I probably don't understand very well how something can be a one and a zero at the same time. One or zero, that makes a lot of sense, understanding the physics behind it, but I haven't understood that part really well. So, you know, it's only the basic building blocks of what you can do and how you can learn. And so I measured it fundamentally with how many other people I can touch and improve and grow. And that's fundamentally people you talk to about me. I love recommending books and providing guidance and helping people out. And that's the only way I measure it.

That's very, very insightful, I must say. And I believe the listeners would really appreciate those comments. How you laid that out is exactly what I think would be considered a perfect answer to that question.

Perfect. I somehow landed on one thing. I didn't know the work-life balance, but I figured this one.

Ram, thank you very much. Really appreciate everything you said. in terms of this interview. If you want, tell the listeners, you know, where to find you guys on social media or website. Yeah. Easy search.

Yeah. Easy search. KiboCommerce.com. Kibo is spelled K-I-B-O and then commerce.com. You can always look me up on LinkedIn. I'm happy to participate with anybody else who's interested in communicating with me or learning from me. Happy to do that anytime. Thank you so much.

Great. Have a great week.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me.