Tucked away into a covert office in Chelsea Piers — overlooking a sweeping view of the Hudson — a lean artificial intelligence startup is shaking up enterprise sales.
The company’s smart technology essentially serves as a massive database for enterprise customers that have a lot of content and little time to sift through it all. The platform allows users to search through all content, from email to CRM portals, and unravel the data behind it. Using machine learning, it makes evidence-based content recommendations, which ultimately help senior leaders make more strategic investments that better connect with sales prospects.
Docurated was co-founded by Alex Gorbansky, Irene Tserkovny, Ed Federbush, Ryan Cooke, Adam Duston and Mike Patterson in 2012. We sat down with a handful of the company’s founders to discuss how the company has evolved — and what they have in store for the future.
Where did the idea for Docurated come from?
Irene Tserkovny, COO: I was coming from working in marketing, and I had some very concrete ideas about challenges I wanted to solve. Alex [Gorbansky] was wrapping up his previous company and was really hungry to start something new. He went to Iceland and worked on some projects and we tossed ideas around, like a Pinterest for your content. I pushed back on that idea because I didn’t think that fundamentally solved the content discovery and access problems people are suffocating from. We went back and forth and came up with a hybrid idea about document curation. From there, we created Docurated.
How did the idea evolve?
Tserkovny: Before this, the concept of curation was very non-defined. It was only something you'd do with art. But the whole concept of being able to automatically curate a set of things that are important to you given your context was always the idea. As a marketer, or as anybody working at a big company, you're drowning in irrelevant things, and you just want quick access to the things that matter to you at a specific point in time.
So we ended up with the concept of analytic visualizing — like a minority report where you're scanning, and the things that you need are at your fingertips.
Ryan Cooke, VP of engineering: I was working in the same office space as Alex. He was throwing around some of these ideas, and I was kind of in a transition point in my work as well. I thought it sounded kind of interesting (this was early 2012) and I was interested in the enterprise space and SaaS taking off. I could build websites, so I offered to help build a prototype.
Then, I was able to bring in Mike [Patterson] and Ed [Federbush], who are great engineers and designers. We got together to see if we could get some of these ideas to materialize into a very early version of a prototype, and that got completed within a couple of months. Then, in mid-May of 2012, I went out and started fundraising. We closed a $1.6 million seed round at the end of June.
What was the time frame around actually getting Docurated off the ground?
Cooke: It was probably eight to 12 weeks from putting code into an editor to us quitting and coming to Docurated full time. Then, we got an office space right here in Chelsea Piers. Before that, we worked in our living room at a dinner table in the evening.
Tserkovny: We worked out of Noodle’s office in Chelsea Piers for about two or three years, and were already making revenue. We were still very, very scrappy at that point.
How did the team and product grow from there?
Adam Dustom, VP of product development: I had been involved in some version of the startup scene in Boston, because I had a company that went through Techstars. That was back in 2009, but one thing the program gave me was introductions to a lot of people in the tech world in Boston. It was through somebody two or three degrees removed from one of those introductions that I ended up at Docurated. So I came in, started slinging some code, they liked what they saw — and they put a ring on it.
Tserkovny: When Adam joined, the prototype we had was a shell of a product. It was basically Pinterest. A few months later, we already had Fortune 500 companies giving us feedback and paying us some nominal amount of money. It became apparent that what Alex and I had been arguing about was true: Without a large amount of content, our product was not valuable. So we needed to get our hands on a large amount of content. Once we had the sync written for the file system, we walked into agencies that had a lot of legacy content that sat in folders and files, and they would say, ‘Can I just pay you with a credit card?’
What does the product and vision look like today?
Tserkovny: I think, partially, the marketplace is forcing us to continuously revisit our core differentiation. We're a very lean team considering there's a lot of complexity we have to support. We have huge enterprise customers. We have customers with 200,000 people. We have customers with nine to ten different styles of information that we're connecting. All of that doesn't leave lot of time as a management team to come together and continue to stay online. So how do you scale?
Adam has been very instrumental in driving that from the engineering perspective. We understand that if we don't come together and cohesively keep reiterating our differentiation around one singular vision — it's just not going to work. Every time you start to talk about, ‘What is Docurated?,’ it still comes back to the original vision because nothing else is actually as compelling. We were founded on something real — the problem truly exists, and it still does.
What is the company most focused on now?
Tserkovny: We’re focusing on continuing to scale and becoming profitable. In order to do that, you have to be very militant about what you will not do, and focus very much around differentiation.
Cooke: Well I think, especially in the engineering and products side, we’re focused on adding a lot of structure because you get pulled in a lot of different directions — both from implementing particular initiatives and keeping operations running. We happened to be deployed at really large scales, and given the complexity of the technology, there's an almost endless opportunity to improve different types of your system and make them better. So it's just very essential, from my role and Adam's role, that we make sure that we're making the most profitable decisions on a daily and weekly basis.
How would you say New York has helped you grow as a company?
Tserkovny: The best customers we have are New York-based, so honestly, we could probably just have this company only selling to New York. In fact, maybe that's the biggest mistake that I think we've ever made, is to try to sell outside of New York. People love face-to-face interactions. In New York, you don't have to teach people the importance of technology.
What do you look for when hiring new employees?
Dustom: We look for an entrepreneurial quality. I would say the type of people who do really well in this environment are self-starters and are able to take on a more executive level function than somebody who likely would occupy their type of position.
Tserkovny: Selfish people don’t do well here. I think people who really are here for the team, for the bigger vision, have done really well here. Creative people do really well here as well.
Cooke: People who aren’t afraid of confrontation. We're very open about challenging each other.
Image via Shutterstock.
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