SteelHouse was founded by a team of experienced direct marketers from eHarmony, E*TRADE, Oracle and Rubicon who were frustrated with the status quo and lack of technological innovation that could really help marketers dramatically increase their eCommerce conversions, sales and revenue. After scouring the marketplace, we found that the behavioral commerce technology we needed simply did not exist.
So we built it.
Our vision was to enable eCommerce marketers to offer different shopping personalities different incentives – at the right time, in the right manner – to increase conversions and accelerate sales and revenue for eCommerce sites. The site would receive the optimal revenue for each type of shopper, and the shopper would receive their optimal incentive to buy.
With these goals in mind, SteelHouse developed the world’s first award-winning, patent-pending personality-driven shopping platform. For the first time ever, eCommerce sites can:
- Gain Insight: See what type of shopping personalities their visitors have
- Get Proactive Recommendations That Will Increase Their Conversions: SteelHouse automatically recommends opportunities to increase conversions, sales and revenue among different types of shopper personalities
- Act In Real-Time: Immediately act on approved opportunities in real-time by building and launching segmented and escalating ads across ad networks and client channels (i.e. home page, related site pages, online ads and other channels) based on unique shopper personalities
- Quickly Optimize Campaigns: SteelHouse’s unprecedented touch-screen user interface gives marketers complete control over their campaigns, including the ability to use hundreds of individual, shopper-specific acquisition, conversion, retention and winback funnels while seeing the incremental lift of each campaign as compared to a constant control group.
As the product of decades of marketing experience, the SteelHouse behavioral commerce platform delivers what eCommerce marketers have always wanted. After all, they’d expect nothing less from something created by marketers, for marketers.
President & CEO: Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas has founded or been on the leadership team of a number of well-known and successful companies. He started his career in Silicon Valley at Oracle, as part of the founding team of the Oracle Applications Division, now a multi-billion dollar business. Following Oracle, Mark started CenterView Software as President & CEO, which was acquired by Informix Software. Mark was then Chief Technology Officer at Persistence Software, which led to a successful IPO, and VP Technology at Covalent Technologies, which was funded by Sequoia Capital and Menlo Ventures and later acquired by VMWare as part of its SpringSource acquisition.
More recently, Mark served as Vice President of Technology at eHarmony for almost four years, building ground-breaking personality trait-based matching technology that enabled eHarmony to become one of the most recognized brands in America. He also served as Vice President of Engineering at the Rubicon Project, a market-leading advertising network. Mark brings together these experiences to SteelHouse as President and CEO, where his knowledge is putting SteelHouse at the forefront of the emerging behavioral commerce market.
Investor Profile
Baroda Ventures is a Los Angeles based venture capital firm founded in 1998 by philanthropist and technology entrepreneur David C. Bohnett, the founder of GeoCities, an Internet-based media company. Baroda has made investments in many successful Southern California startups including LowerMyBills.com, Xdrive, stamps.com, NetZero and others.
Baroda is led by David Bohnett and Peter Lee.
David is a philanthropist and technology entrepreneur. He is currently serving as Chairman of the David Bohnett Foundation, Chairman of the Board of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, Board Member of the California Community Foundation and Trustee of amfAR (The Foundation for AIDS Research) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). In 1994, he founded GeoCities, a media company that at the time was one of the four most trafficked sites on the internet.
Peter Lee is a partner at Baroda Ventures and was previously an investor at Clearstone Ventures and Prism Ventures. Prior to entering venture capital, he was the Vice President of Operations and Product Management at Goldpocket (acquired by TandbergTV), a startup developing a platform for creating, distributing and managing interactive TV digital media systems. Earlier, Peter was a manager with McKinsey, where he focused on the digital media, consumer electronics, and internet industries.
Investor Profile
Ronald Conway has been an active angel investor for over 15 years. He was the Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds (1998-2005) whose investments included: Google, Ask Jeeves, Paypal, Good Technology, Opsware, and Brightmail. He was recently named #6 in Forbes Magazine Midas list of top “deal-makers” in 2008 and is actively involved in numerous philanthropic endeavors.
Ron was with National Semiconductor Corporation in marketing positions (1973-1979), Altos Computer Systems as a co-founder, President and CEO (1979-1990) and took Altos public on Nasdaq in 1982 and served as CEO of Personal Training Systems (PTS) (1991-1995). PTS was acquired by SmartForce/SkillSoft (Nasdaq SKIL). Ron has served/serves on Boards/Advisory Boards including: Twitter, Digg.com, Bright Mail, Ask Jeeves, Rupture (acquired by EA), Associated Content, Facebook, RockYou, ScanScout, Zappos, Trulia, StumbleUpon, Plaxo (acquired by Comcast), Photobucket (acquired by Fox), and Anchor Intelligence (co-founder). Philanthropically, Ron is Vice Chairman of the UCSF Medical Foundation in SF, Board Member of The Tiger Woods Foundation, and SF Homeless Connect, and on the Benefit Committee of Ronald McDonald House, College Track, and the Blacked Eyed Peas-PeaPod Academy Foundation.