Case Application 2

Qordoba: How Sweet It Is to Find a Solution to a Problem

The founders of the start-up Qordoba (a content management platform firm) realized that many companies have a problem. Companies need their corporate names, slogans, and brand messaging to be consistent across thousands of mentions on the internet. Just imagine the difficulty involved when a company makes a change to their messaging that requires consistency across so many hard-to-catch locations online. "This is something that used to be done completely manually, one string at a time. Very slow, very tedious, very error-prone, and we automated it," explained May Habib, Qordoba's CEO and cofounder.⁵⁸⁰ Engineers didn't enjoy that work ... it's boring, and it's not putting their talents to good use.

Qordoba's software checks for consistency, language, and grammar. The software uses machine learning to ensure that newly created content is consistent with a company's style guide. The software even can check to make sure that the tone and emotion of newly created text is consistent with the way a company's marketing wants a message to sound.⁵⁸¹ And text updates can be made without engineers' help.

Originally, Qordoba planned on helping businesses translate their digital content into different languages, but they quickly figured out that a larger problem businesses faced was consistency. This problem was considered important enough that Qordoba's founders were able to get financing from venture capitalists in the Silicon Valley even though their business at first was located in Dubai. As Jennifer Fonstad, a venture capitalist who helped organize funding for Qordoba, put it, "Everyone we spoke to had this problem. The challenge was so prolific that we felt they'd hit on something."⁵⁸²

Qordoba relocated from Dubai to San Francisco. Just a few months later, they were able to raise another round of venture capital: $11.5 million. Qordoba is going to be doing a lot of hiring with these funds. They have plans to hire in areas like product development, data science, and sales.

Customers like the NBA, Marriott, Sephora, and Visa use their software. In September 2018, Qordoba was named one of Forbes's Cloud 100 Rising Stars, which means it is considered one of the top 100 privately held cloud computing companies in the world.

10-15. What leadership requirements and challenges do you think Qordoba might be dealing with now? How might those leadership requirements and challenges change for Qordoba in the future?