Last week, Xconomy published a story about how I jammed with Bullhorn CEO Art Papas in the music room at his software company’s downtown Boston headquarters. Hard-hitting journalism, I know.
But our meeting wasn’t just about rocking out to a Foo Fighters song. We also chatted about his 18-year-old company’s ups and downs, why it revamped its culture, and how he and other Bullhorn employees started an in-house rock band, Stampede.
Papas shared plenty of other pearls of tech wisdom that didn’t make it into that story: his thoughts on LinkedIn’s $26.2 billion sale to Microsoft, tech unicorns over the years, artificial intelligence hype, and the evolution of user interfaces. (Plus, more fun facts about Stampede.)
Here are more highlights of our conversation, edited for clarity:
Xconomy: How much did Vista Equity Partners pay to acquire Bullhorn in 2012?
Art Papas: I can just tell you it was a nine-figure deal. So, a good price, but we weren’t fully unicorn status at that point. But that was 2012, before being a unicorn was a hip thing to do. I don’t think it’s so cool anymore, actually. I think people have unicorn indigestion.
But whenever people get too frothy about valuations, it’s like—because we were born in that time—1999. If you were a tech company and focused on the Internet, the valuations were incredibly high. People couldn’t live up to the expectations. Then eventually there’s a reckoning there.
It’s funny because a lot of tech companies are [now] focused on being profitable. That’s how we’ve always run [Bullhorn]. It’s like, isn’t that the point of a business? You should have some money left over after you pay your employees and your vendors. You take that and you use it to make new investments, or you take it to make acquisitions, or you take it to pay back shareholders. It’s sort of a novel concept, profitability, and it’s funny how many entrepreneurs I meet with who are struggling to get profitable in their businesses. That should be a discipline. You aren’t really in business if you’re just incinerating capital every year.
But I get it, in some businesses you have to grow. It’s a market share play. But most businesses, I think there’s a balance between healthy growth and profits.
X: I know you are still mostly focused on the staffing and recruiting industry, but being a customer relationship management software company, that puts you in competition with the likes of Salesforce and Microsoft. Both of them were bidding on LinkedIn. Obviously Microsoft won. Did that outcome make you feel relief, or dread, or something else?
AP: I’ll give it to Microsoft. Those guys have done an amazing job changing the profile of that company under [Satya Nadella’s] leadership. I think the LinkedIn acquisition makes a ton of sense. They’ve said that they’re not really doing much to integrate the two businesses, short term. But LinkedIn is an important partner for Bullhorn. I think there’s no plans to change that relationship.
I think that [acquisition] was a smart move. I also think there’s value in having the data and the software together, but I think the nature of the way people work is changing pretty dramatically.
I was in a customer site just two weeks ago, and I was observing some of our users using the [Bullhorn] software. What I noticed is five years ago, they would’ve used their e-mail and Bullhorn, and gone back and forth. And now it’s like e-mail; Bullhorn; Slack; they’ve got their phone on their lap and they’re text messaging with customers; they’re using LinkedIn; they’re using … a customer portal that they kept jumping in and out of. There’s all this technology that they’re using. Oh, and also they were using WhatsApp. So not only were they using text with some clients, some clients use WhatsApp.
It was a really, almost mind-boggling experience. How do they keep it straight? And very clearly, the person I was watching, I watched them get confused a couple times on the phone.
And I think where it’s going is every company, whether it’s LinkedIn or Bullhorn or Salesforce, all of us are trying to understand how are humans going to interface with technology and data? And I don’t think the answer is going to be an app or a desktop. I see there’s going to be a trend toward a different type of user interface.
I feel like if you look at one of the hottest things right now it’s [Amazon’s] Alexa [devices] and Google Home. Siri, not so much—[Apple hasn’t] gotten that right. But I watch my kids talk to Alexa. My wife and I aren’t quite as into it, but they really are. They’ve really adapted to the voice user interface.
And I think the text user interface is coming back. … I think that we are going to get to a place where people are going to be able to talk or type in natural language and get response from the data.
People talk about chatbots. All that really is, is like, hey, let’s give users a text user interface because that’s the most frequent thing they’re doing is texting, or e-mailing, or using some user interface to enter data by text. [Bullhorn is] doing a lot with that, and we’re going to announce some stuff this June at our big customer conference, Engage.
X: How are you going to take advantage of that?
AP: It’s sort of the intersection of the mobile phone and artificial intelligence to do natural language processing. It’s pretty exciting times.
And the tools have gotten really, really affordable. It used to be if you wanted to talk about artificial intelligence, you had to go and get a data scientist team. And that’s not really the case anymore. The skill set required to do lightweight A.I. is much, much lower than it used to be.
X: That’s refreshing to hear you say lightweight to at least put it in context because I think a lot of companies will just say, “We’re doing A.I.” But there are varying degrees of it, right?
AP: Artificial intelligence is really just a buzzword. People say machine learning, which
