The BBC’s weekly The Boss series profiles a different business leader from around the world. This week we speak to Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and chief executive of customer data infrastructure firm Segment.
It takes a certain kind of courage, and honesty, to admit when you are wrong.
Peter Reinhardt will quite cheerfully admit that at one point he was determined to kill the idea behind his now rapidly expanding and very successful business.
He had tried two business ideas before with the firm he had co-founded with three friends. Both ideas had failed.
He and his friends had wanted to identify and solve a problem facing organisations.
The first idea, Classmetric, was “a total disaster”, he says.
An online tool designed to give professors an insight into how well students were understanding lectures, it fell at the first hurdle, as rather than using the tool, students “went straight to Facebook”.
But while developing the failed ideas, the co-founders – Peter, Calvin French-Owen, Ilya Volodarsky and Ian Storm Taylor, who has since left the firm – wrote a small piece of computer code that was to become the basis of the successful company, Segment.
The code acted as a pipeline connecting customer data from different websites. “We’d built it for ourselves to solve our own data pipeline problems,” says Peter.
