Appature’s Kabir Shahani with Jeff Dickey of NextCast

Kabir Shahani and his team at Appature want to help marketers create intensely personal customer experiences.

How are they going to do it?

By leveraging the incredible opportunities the current technology space is affording them, aggregating massive amounts of data, and always striving to solve a new problem.

Oh — and maybe trying to create a new unicorn too.


  • Though he almost went down the path to becoming a doctor, Kabir realized early on that technology was where his passion lay. “It’s clear that’s where I wanted to spend the rest of my career,” he says. So when his business partner presented him with the idea of solving a real, customer-based problem through enterprise software, Kabir just couldn’t say no – and Appature was born. (2:08)
  • “We focused on value creation – the concept was that everything we did created value for the customer, and was significant enough to create revenue,” he explains of the early days at Appature. “Your idea doesn’t really matter, it’s the value your idea creates.” Their philosophy was simple – talk face to face with customers and find a real problem customers would pay to have solved. (3:50)
  • Visionaries always in search of a completely new solution, Kabir and his team met with customers and would “wire frame out ideas on a whiteboard” and bring them back to the office to build. “Now we’ve got to create this magical creature you just made up” was a common refrain – and so the unicorn became their mascot. (6:50)
  • “The last 12 months have been particularly interesting,” says Kabir. “We’re seeing that the architecture under which we built technology is going through the biggest shift it has in the last 20 years. Companies like ours who are leveraging those trends like big data, and we are creating the next generation of enterprise software.” (11:50)
  • “We’re very oriented towards obsoleting ourselves,” Kabir says of his growing team at Appature. And they’re just getting started. Ever-focused on making marketing massively personal through data, the future looks very exciting for Kabir and Appature. “We’ve got a lot of runway.” (13:19)

Nextcast founder Jeff Dickey is passionate about technology, business and philosophy. He works as the chief cloud architect at Redapt, a Redmond-based cloud and big data infrastructure company. [Editor’s note: GeekWire is proud to partner with Jeff Dickey who produces the Nextcast entrepreneur interview series]. Additional reporting for this Nextcast interview by Kate Stull.

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