In Stay Sharp Episode 89, 25 Years of Razorleaf: Pioneering Digital Engineering, co-hosts Jonathan Scott and Juliann Grant welcome Razorleaf CEO and co-founder Eric Doubell back to the podcast. Jonathan (who’s worked for the company since the early days) and Juliann (a “newbie” with only a decade on the team) get Eric talking about Razorleaf’s origin stories, as well as the guiding principles that have enabled the company to not just grow, but also thrive.
Razorleaf’s Beginnings
The plans for what became Razorleaf actually began as a CAD reseller’s spinoff. Eric worked for the reseller and helped develop the project, but at the last minute, the owner decided not to pull the trigger. Eric explains, “At that point we had the business plan, we had been spending months preparing for it. So I just left and, with our salesperson, started Razorleaf and started working with other resellers to help them implement PLM.” Jonathan came on board about a year later, after Eric convinced a different reseller to focus on their strengths, hand over Jonathan, and outsource their PLM operations to Razorleaf.
A “big, pivotal moment in the history of Razorleaf,” Jonathan says, was a critical decision the company made in the early years: to not be tied to one platform or product line. “There’re different ways you grow your business,” Eric notes. “You can focus or you can diversify. We chose diversification, and it’s been good for some things, bad for others. But it became our personality that we wanted to be product agnostic. We wanted to be able to represent what we thought were the best products in the space.” This many years later, that philosophy and approach has impacted the company culture. “That’s part of who we are now,” Eric says.
Lessons Learned Along the Way
A key thread that runs through the discussion, as well as the company itself, is the emphasis and value placed on having clear vision and being adaptable. Eric admits that he’s had “the good fortune of working for a lot of really bad companies,” but he tried to learn from them. “We make plenty of mistakes,” he says. “I just didn’t want to make the stupid mistakes I had seen.” But trying things is the name of the game—not everything you try will work, but you’ve got to be prepared for that, prepared to step back and try something else. He adds, “If you stop trying to change because the one thing you tried didn’t work, you’re not going to be around long enough to have to worry about that.”
The idea of everything—not just products—having a lifecycle is another conclusion Eric has drawn over the years. “Even the services and our business has a lifecycle to it. So it’s ironic. We deal with product lifecycle and we’re thinking about lifecycles of products. Our product is a service and it’s got a lifecycle too,” Eric says. As a company, Razorleaf has had to change its role as technology changed and as customers began do to more on their own. They had to start doing the more difficult stuff, Eric says, “Because the hard things are things people haven’t figured out yet, and they’re the things that not everybody’s doing. It’s where people need help. And so if we got into business to help people do things better, then the place to do that is the things that haven’t been figured out yet.”
Other lessons Razorleaf has learned along the way include letting things happen the way they should and paying attention to what’s important. The latter led to another revelation Eric was surprised to have early on: running a business isn’t just about business, it’s about the people. “You’ve got to think about the business, but that doesn’t mean you can’t think about the team that you’ve got,” Eric says. Jonathan offers a reason for why he’s stayed at the company so long, “You realized from the beginning what kind of business you wanted to start. It shows through with the choices we make—and they’re not always public facing.” He adds, “That’s what makes Razorleaf a special place.”
Learn More About What Guides Razorleaf’s Innovation
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including why culture mapping and research on different cultures is important for a global company, why Eric advises taking the long view and making decisions for the long term, where he thinks Razorleaf is in the pendulum swing of industry changes, where that may take the company, and more.
Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 89: 25 Years of Razorleaf: Pioneering Digital Engineering and join us each week for a new podcast.
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