From Our Founder and CEO

The birth of the Web in the early ’90s led to a Cambrian explosion of innovation and a euphoric sense of transformational possibilities. From the beginning, there was a palpable sense that all aspects of society would benefit from the democratization of information and the ability to collaborate in completely new ways. The reach of its transformational and disruptive attributes went beyond simply sharing information and establishing new forms of social connections and was expected to fundamentally revolutionize commerce of all kinds—business-to-consumer, business-to-business and consumer-to-consumer.

Today, nearly 20 years later, while next-generation companies in most every web category have begun to deliver on the promise of their predecessors, we’ve seen very little in the way of innovation in e-commerce.

Business-to-Business Commerce

When Rearden Commerce commenced operations in early 2000, the hype around B2B e-commerce was at its peak, with hundreds of so-called “marketplace” vendors established and leaders like Commerce One valued in the tens of billions of dollars. The promise of the marketplaces was to bring buyers and sellers together in a way that removed friction, delivered transparency, optimized transactions for both parties and allowed for whole new public and private ecosystems to emerge.

In reality, none of the marketplaces delivered on these promises. They lacked robust and flexible technology platforms to enable buyers and sellers to quickly on-board and transact. Instead, each integration was a custom one-off implementation requiring a school bus full of newly-minted consultants and systems integrators to assist in the effort. Further, they had primitive matching and personalization capabilities, transactions lacked relevance and value, and the user experience was simply awful. For buyers, the marketplaces did little more than automate the approval process for purchasing products and services. For sellers, they provided no value whatsoever — providing little-to-no incremental customer distribution, forcing them to compete on price alone. As a result, their business models were deeply flawed and once the artificially-induced demand disappeared — which was fueled by classic capital-market bubble hysteria — the marketplaces and vendors died off.

Those few that did survive retrenched to solving very simple purchasing and related problems with vertical-specific applications like sourcing, procurement, travel and expense management. These applications are overly-featured, difficult-to-use, have low adoption rates and high costs of ownership for those companies that could actually get the apps deployed.

Business-to-Consumer E-Commerce

At the same time, in the B2C space, companies were automating vertical-specific transactions such as Travel, Dining, Events, Books, Electronics, Home Services and more. These companies built destination sites and related consumer brands and helped fuel the keyword-based search model that has worked so well for Google. For consumers, there was tangible value relative to previous phone and paper-based search and purchasing experiences. Many of these companies exist today but very much in the form they did 10 or 15 years ago. They still know very little about me and my likes (and dislikes) or where I am or where I may be and what I need without me explicitly telling them — and they never work on my behalf unless I take the time to go to their sites or apps.

I believed then, as I do now, that a consumer or employee shouldn’t have to spend hours each week searching through scores of different sites, re-keying in repetitive data, cutting and pasting itineraries or purchase data into their calendars, sending emails to friends and colleagues with related information, and constantly monitoring the status of their purchases. I founded Rearden Commerce with a vision of a much smarter Web and one in which commerce could literally be perfected for consumers and businesses and the merchants that want to transact with them.

For Users

I set out to build a web that understood the identity, location and context of users and worked on their behalf — much like a virtual personal assistant — to manage their day-to-day commerce activities by delivering high-value products and services in the most personalized and relevant way possible.
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For Businesses

The goal from the outset was to offer a single smart e-commerce marketplace that would give them immediate access to all of their “suppliers,” to manage their employee expenditures, and enable them to employ identity-based buying so that all employee purchases were tied to their roles, entitlements and approvals. For small businesses that lacked the buying power of enterprises, I envisioned leveraging the aggregate purchasing power of our entire marketplace to deliver deep discounts on everyday spend.
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For Merchants

I intended to give merchants the wherewithal to access and cost-effectively target just the right individual consumers and businesses — among a universe of tens of millions — exactly when and where they are in the market for specific products and services, offering a fully sustainable experience that enables merchants to maximize long-term profitability, even with fluctuations in demand and perishable inventory. Rather than traditional “spray and pray” mass-market customer acquisition techniques — broadcast media, newspapers, trade shows and generic online advertising — I wanted to give them a personalized, one-to-one e-commerce marketplace where they could uniquely match their specific business needs on an ongoing basis to the exact audience of consumers and businesses needed to maximize the business benefits for the merchant.
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Today

After a decade of uncommon dedication and innovation by our employees, patience and capital from our investors and visionary commitments by our partners, we are closer than ever to our mission of perfecting commerce.

We believe:

We hope you join us on our journey.