Visionaries
Back in the heady 1990s, the freshly paved Information Superhighway was a pristine and sleek frontier ripe for a new breed of prospector. Shimmering on the virtual horizon of the global village, the dawning of an era of infinite potential promised swift enlightenment along with prosperity, in perpetuity. But as the dot-com bubble burst of a decade ago illustrated, even superhighways are prone to snarls of congestion.
Smooth navigation was never a problem for Jeffrey M. Stibel. He has plowed through minor setbacks with singular drive and focus ever since his first college start-up flopped. Today, the 36-year-old chairman and CEO soaks in a panoramic view of the Pacific at the Malibu corporate headquarters of his latest venture, Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. In conversation, Stibel exudes an earnest, can-do energy even when acknowledging his failures. “Happily, I tend to avoid big mistakes,” he says, calling his professional missteps “some of my proudest achievements because I learned from them.” The words sound genuine and not the least bit trite coming from the man who holds the U.S. patent for search engine technology, a fundamental element of the online terrain as it exists today.
Stibel’s intelligent designs on partnering up with Dun & Bradstreet in 2010 melded the brand identity of a storied, 170-year-old company with an emphasis on keeping pace with the flow of evolving technology as it relates to business credibility. “In the 1800s,” he explains, “business credibility meant sitting down with a business owner and looking at the whites of someone’s eyes. That’s how trade was done.” The Internet has shifted the rules of engagement: Face-to-face, in-person connections are neither practical nor expeditious in many cases. Rather, voluminous data from a collective of online hubs can be tracked and cataloged to render a detailed portrait of a business’s personality. Twitter, Yelp, MojoPages, CityGrid Media, Google images and others help supplement D&B’s proprietary credit data: Tweets, customer reviews, and even storefront image captures contribute up-to-the-minute data on business operations.
“The mission of D&B Credibility,” Stibel explains, “is to update the parameters for business creditworthiness. Credibility is a play on words for us,” he points out. Blatant distortions, selective disclosure, and nefarious methods of seduction are increasingly employed by online marketeers. In turn, Stibel perceived the need for a centralized entity to sift through and valuate the constantly merging flow of information. “All of this speaks to credibility, which will ultimately allow us to do some scoring of our own, like a credibility score,” predicts Stibel.
The city of Malibu, with its salty surf and spectacular sunsets, seems an uncharacteristically laid-back locale for the nerve center of a top-tier financial company. Wouldn’t New York be a more suitable choice? “The only question we had was moving out of the New York City area for our corporate headquarters, given we are so focused on the credit and financial markets,” Stibel confirms. “But in the end, we realized it didn’t really matter where our headquarters was. We were going to go where we thought we had the best employee pool. For us, that really was the Westside and some of the valleys. This is just a tremendous place to work.”
Stibel welcomes the distinction of being the largest employer in the city. “We’ve got 25,000 square feet overlooking the Pacific Ocean and that makes us a major employer here, which allows us to act locally,” he says. “You can’t always do that when your employees are spread out all over the world.” The company also has seven satellite offices -- in Arizona, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Texas -- and Stibel envisions D&B Credibility being one of the largest financial sector employers nationwide.
“To be clear, we’re extremely picky,” he explains. “We’re looking for a certain caliber and a certain level [of experience]. But we’re looking for hundreds more people, and we’ve already added in the hundreds.” The prognosis is rosy and embroidered with a silver lining. “We’re a business that’s growing in the double digits,” he maintains.
Anyone skeptical of Stibel’s visionary acumen need look no further than his meteoric track record. Long before he was deemed one of Business Week’s “40 Under 40,” Stibel was driven to excessive success. After earning degrees in psychology and philosophy from Tufts University, he pursued graduate studies in brain science (an amalgamation of psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience) at Brown University. He also found time to study business, marketing, and economics at MIT Sloan School of Management. Applying his passion to practice came naturally for Stibel; he formed a search and marketing company, along with professors from Brown, MIT, and Princeton, which was sold to NetZero in 2001 and again to ValueClick a few years later. The footprints of Stibel’s aforementioned patent are still evident today.
In 2005, he was brought in as president and CEO of Web.com (previously Interland), leading the company to a threefold increase in stock revenue in just three years. In 2009, he published “Wired for Thought,” a provocative read that delves into the evolutionary adaptations of the brain in the midst of evolving technology. He also examines how the Internet and human brain have operational parallels, pointing out, “Although a human brain cannot calculate a mathematical equation as quickly as even the most basic calculator, it can easily determine where a ball in mid-flight will land without calculating its precise trajectory or velocity.”
Studies show the capacity for memory and attention have dipped with the advent of the Internet, but Stibel counters that raw intelligence has not been adversely affected. “In fact, what you see is in other areas, brain muscles have been stretched.”
When the subject of failure comes up, Stibel’s somewhat inverted perspective is refreshing. “The whole concept of failing forward, where you learn from your mistakes, is so important. I’ve told more people than I care to remember that for me, my successes sometimes bother me. I don’t learn enough from them. When I succeed, half the time I shrug my shoulders and go, ‘Eh… it coulda been luck.’ But when I fail, each and every time that I fail, I’m always kicking myself, I always know exactly what I did wrong, and I improve against that. There is nothing wrong with failing as long as you learn from it, you grow, you move on quickly, you tell everyone you know about it.”
Sage sentiments such as these are not typically shared by someone who has not yet made 40 trips around the sun. Stibel embraces decisive moments of truth when they arise, something he realizes not every president or CEO is prone to do. “Too many people in leadership positions end up frozen when it comes to making decisions,” he posits. “In many cases, it’s analysis paralysis where they just have too much information to make a decision. In other cases, they’re so risk-averse, that they’re genuinely concerned about a couple different outcomes and end up making no decision at all. That lack of a decision is a decision point. It could be far more destructive than the actual decision you could have made.” Stibel throws down another salient point. “It is critically important to set up your business, and frankly, your life, in such a way that no decision is so costly that it is going to destroy you or your business. If you set it up that way, bad decisions turn out to be really good.”
Stibel is pragmatic in discussing his ascension through the ranks of the business world. “I think the reason I was so successful at such an early age was I followed my passion,” he says. “This just happens to be something that I love. More than golf. More than surfing. I love building companies. I love working with people to do this. And my other passion on the science side, on brain science, pushed me into this particular area of business, the Internet. I’ve been incredibly blessed and fortunate.”
The focused abandon with which Stibel pursues his professional goals does not come at the expense of a fulfilling home life. “My real passion, the thing that gets me going every day, are my kids, my wife -- my family,” he reveals. Married 10 years, he and his wife have a daughter, 4, and a son, 6. “I couldn’t imagine doing anything other than being at work and being with them. Nothing makes me happier -- at least for now. When they become teenagers, it’ll probably change [laughs].”
As for his 5-year prognosis for D&B Credibility, his little 170-year-old start-up, Stibel is sure of one thing. “Honest answer? I don’t know,” he declares, immediately affirming, “That’s the right answer. What we hope to achieve [is] to be the dominant provider of credit and credibility services. Our ultimate goal is to see more lending get done. Because that’s what allows the economy to grow and what allows each of us to make more money. We have hitched our sales to the overall economy.”
Words plainly spoken were never more golden.