BUSINESS

Former ExactTarget exec joins Bluebridge to create mobile apps for workplaces

James Briggs
james.briggs@indystar.com

When Todd Richardson was an executive at ExactTarget, there was an intern who caught everyone's attention.

Todd Richardson is a former executive vice president of administration for ExactTarget.

Santiago Jaramillo joined ExactTarget in 2010 while he was a student at Indiana Wesleyan University. Jaramillo was impressive. He was confident. He was mature. And just six years later, he's becoming Richardson's boss.

Jaramillo's mobile app tech company, Bluebridge, has acquired Richardson's consulting firm, Cadence Consulting, for an undisclosed equity stake in Bluebridge. As part of the deal, Richardson is joining Bluebridge to serve under Jaramillo in a role called chief people officer. Bluebridge also is acquiring Richardson's intellectual property and client relationships as part of an effort to create apps for companies so they can increase engagement with workers.

Richardson, 40, said it won't be strange working for a former intern. Richardson has followed and supported Jaramillo's career since he moved on from ExactTarget.

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Jaramillo, 26, launched Bluebridge out of his dorm room in March 2011. Richardson contributed to Bluebridge's first funding round despite knowing almost nothing about the company.

"I just always could tell he had that something special," Richardson said. "I didn't even ask what Bluebridge did or was going to do. This was simply an investment in a person I believed in. My initial investment four years ago was simply a vote of confidence in him to let him know I supported him. Thankfully, from an investor standpoint, he didn't disappoint."

Now, Richardson knows exactly what Bluebridge does — and he's on board with it.

Fishers-based Bluebridge started out with a mobile app platform that helped tourism agencies create apps. Apps running on Bluebridge's platform promote destinations as small as Fishers and as large as South Africa. Bluebridge adapted the platform to create apps for churches. Now, Bluebridge is evolving to create apps that let corporate management team members and employees interact with one another.

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Bluebridge tested the concept on itself last year, Jaramillo said. A beta version of the app offered information to Bluebridge's employees, such as a list of ever-shifting priorities and a photo staff list to help new workers get to know their colleagues. The app also enabled push notifications to as many or as few employees as the sender would like.

"A company can send a push notification just to Bob, or just to marketing, or just to the Vancouver office instead of the Indianapolis office," Jaramillo said.

Now, Bluebridge is making the platform available to clients. Mobile apps for internal corporate communications have been an inexplicable oversight as smartphones have become a dominant form of communication, Jaramillo said.

"Companies so far have been ignoring that," Jaramillo said. "They haven't used an employee app to communicate with them. It's mind-blowing to me. We're all using apps and push notifications to communicate with each other, but the place where we spend the most amount of time is at work, and we don't have an app we can use to improve that experience."

Santiago Jaramillo founded Bluebridge in 2011.

Jaramillo's philosophy matches Richardson's expertise in workplace culture. Richardson was the executive vice president of administration for ExactTarget before it sold to San Francisco-based Salesforce for $2.5 billion in 2013. ExactTarget grew from 200 workers to 300 while Richardson was there.

"He's essentially bottled up the key insights from 15 years of learning how to engage employees," Jaramillo said.

Richardson said he had planned to retire but instead launched a consulting firm focused on employee engagement. Mobile apps will enable his work to help more companies improve their cultures, he said.

"All of those crazy things I've wanted to do through employee engagement, I've had to do through sheer force," Richardson said. "I now get to put them in a mobile platform that's replicable — and replicable to hundreds of thousands of employees."

As part of Richardson's role, he'll also focus on cultivating a "world-class" culture at Bluebridge, he said. The company has grown from 26 employees in September 2014 to 40 employees. Revenue is growing by triple digits annually, Jaramillo said. App sessions on Bluebridge clients' mobile apps grew about 550 percent to 11.1 million sessions in 2015.

Richardson takes pride in seeing a former intern at the top of the fast-growing company.

"When I say I'm working for someone dramatically younger than me and someone that at one point was an intern for ExactTarget, it sounds odd," Richardson said. "But the reality is it's kind of a seamless transition, and it's because of the manner in which he presents himself and the maturity he's had since day one. The executives at ExactTarget, we looked around and knew he was going to be something special in short order."

Call IndyStar reporter James Briggs at (317) 444-6307. Follow him on Twitter: @JamesEBriggs.