A Letter from William Magnuson, Chief Executive Officer and Cofounder of Braze

We founded Braze 10 years ago with the deeply held belief that the broad adoption of mobile would drive tremendous change in business and society. It was a step change in human history: the moment in our evolution when humans gained the ability to be constantly connected—to each other, to the collective knowledge of our species, and to the products and services that brands compete to deliver every day.

At our founding, Jon Hyman, Mark Ghermezian and I shared a dual conviction about the opportunities presented by mobile. First, fast growing new businesses would be born and built to be mobile first. And second, that generations-old companies would be driven by changing consumer behavior to transform the way they delivered products and services.

Our goal was to build a company that would capitalize on new technology to help the world’s best companies grow faster and more confidently by trusting us with their most valuable asset: their customer relationships. While technological change drove us forward, we knew that humanity should always guide us.

Since those early days, we’ve seen tremendous evolution by brands of all kinds. Great apps became great businesses by building authentic, long-term relationships with their customers. Existing businesses adapted their products to the “always-on” mobile world, investing in direct, first-party relationships. Braze was built to help brands forge strong bonds with their customers and over the past few years, we have seen customer engagement become a critical brand priority around the world. We are excited to continue our work alongside our customers to push its practice to new heights.

Humans are complicated, dynamic, and demanding. Even with the best tools, it is still hard to deliver a consistently excellent customer experience. As consumer expectations and the number of digital channels and devices continue to grow, complexity increases. That makes it even more important for brands to have a sophisticated customer engagement platform like Braze.

Braze exists to help brand teams imagine innovative customer experiences, create the ideal journey for each customer and evolve campaign strategies based on customer reactions in real time. Technology continues to advance, and we at Braze continue to be nimble, as we see a growing recognition that authentic engagement and relationship-building are fundamental to business-building.

As Braze has grown over the last decade, three generational shifts have converged, creating a large and rapidly growing business opportunity to serve both emerging disruptors and traditional enterprises:

• Computing is intimate and connectivity is persistent—with mobile, we can engage with brands from practically anywhere. An “always-on” consumer demands a customer experience that deeply understands their context, and acts on it in the moment.
• Building first-party relationships is both a possibility and an imperative for every industry. Modern brands know that when a customer is intermediated by a third-party aggregator, ad platform or distribution channel, it’s not really their customer relationship. The highest value customer relationships are informed by first-party data and cemented through direct engagement.
• Excellence in customer engagement demands interdisciplinary collaboration. Marketing teams have evolved to incorporate close collaboration with data scientists and product teams in order to amplify their creativity and hone their efforts over time. We believe that the businesses that achieve the highest ROI with Braze are those that embrace an “imagine, create, and evolve” loop fueled by cross-team collaboration.

To take advantage of this incredible opportunity, Braze has grown with a global mindset since our founding. Making our start in a borrowed office in New York City, we’ve since expanded around the world with teams in Austin, Chicago, Berlin, London, San Francisco, Singapore, and Tokyo in addition to our New York headquarters. We have been acknowledged as a Leader in “The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Campaign Management (Independent Platforms), Q3 2021” and in “The Forrester Wave™: Mobile Engagement Automation, Q3 2020,” and listed in the Forbes Cloud 100 four years in a row, as well as being recognized in Crain’s Best Places to Work in NYC three years in a row.

Braze is well positioned to stay on the leading edge of the ongoing customer engagement evolution. Our ability to maintain this leadership position is a direct result of our strategy, teamwork and the dedication of every one of our employees (more than 1,000 strong as of this writing) to achieve our goals and operate by our values: Take Your Seat At The Table, Don’t Ignore Smoke, Shape The Future, Embrace Curiosity, Seek The Truth, and Be A Human. It is an honor to lead this company into its next decade, and we hope you’ll join us in shaping the future of customer engagement.

Cheers,

Bill