A serial entrepreneur and innovator, Nicholas Grouf (MBA 1995) helped create the technology for online personalization, cowrote the first policies around Internet privacy, developed bundled low-cost computers and online access, launched the first online examples of grassroots fundraising and targeted advertising, and now advises startups and early-stage companies as they get their own ideas off the ground.

In this video, Grouf reflects on his track record as a tech entrepreneur and innovator.

“The whole idea of making a difference obviously is a big concept. From an entrepreneurial perspective, the great opportunity is to build products that delight people across the globe, but also to create jobs and opportunities for people to explore their creativity and change other people's lives.

“I was very lucky. I started my first company while I was here at Harvard Business School. It was a company called Firefly, and we pioneered personalization on the internet. We were responsible for inventing something called collaborative filtering. If you go to Amazon and it recommends books, or if you go to Netflix and it recommends movies, that's all our core technology. On the basis of that we realized that privacy was going to be a very important issue online. We wrote the first privacy policies online; worked with Clinton and Gore and their administration [and] the EU and Pacific Rim countries to develop something called the P3P Privacy Standards.

“From there, I left after about a year and moved down to the Bay Area and did some work as an entrepreneur-in-residence at SoftBank before starting my second company, People PC. Our focus there was really to democratize access to technology. At the time, it was very expensive to buy a brand-new computer, and then you had to pay over $20 a month for Internet access. We bundled a computer and online access and support for less than $25 a month and launched that business. And soon into it [we] got a call from the Ford Motor Company. The CIO said, ‘We're spending over $125 million a year communicating with our employees,’ and asked us if we would help him put a computer in the home of every employee worldwide.

“We did that with Ford, and then the next day in the front page of the New York Times announced a similar deal with Delta Airlines for their nearly 90,000 employees worldwide, and then went on to do it Vivendi, Universal, the New York Times Company. We took the company public, and ultimately merged it with EarthLink.

“After that, I got a call from a friend who was working with the brother of John Kerry. Kerry was, at the time, running for president. They said, “We’re smart, we know what the Internet is, but we can't quite figure out how to harness it for the campaign. Could you help us?’ And so I went in and oversaw the technology. We were responsible for information dissemination, getting out the vote, and grassroots fundraising. That was really the first time that you saw major dollars being raised online.

“One of the things that we learned was that you could target advertising in a very different way if you were to think about the cable infrastructure differently. So we built another company in the advertising technology space, called Spot Runner, which made it possible for a small family business to not only have inexpensive creative for television, but also that you could target those ads to just a five- or 10-mile radius around where your store was located rather than having to buy the entire greater Los Angeles area or the New York metropolitan area.

“Since then what I've been trying to do is to start companies without having to be the CEO. I have three small daughters at home, and there's nothing more important to me than spending time with my family. I love to build, and just love that creative experience. We bought a warehouse building, and we start businesses there and build teams and put the strategy in place, raise the capital, and set them on their way.”

(Published September 2015)

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