Ex-Amazon Manager Gets Funding to Help Retailers Battle His Former Employer
Guru Hariharan spent half-a-decade at Amazon.com AMZN +0.67%, but says he had little face-to-face contact with the man he considers his idol, CEO Jeff Bezos. A former junior engineer who rose up the company ranks before departing in 2009, Hariharan only ever talked to Bezos once in his five-and-a-half year Amazon career, answering questions for him and his senior executives during a three-hour annual review.
“If you think about labor as the most painful thing in life, that surpassed it probably,” says Hariharan, who remembers spending several weeks preparing a six-page document on the successes of Amazon Webstore, a service offered by the Seattle company to other business building online retailing sites.
Long removed from those ulcer-inducing meetings, Hariharan is hoping that his new startup, Boomerang Commerce, can turn the tables and cause Amazon’s CEO some headaches as it aids the e-commerce giant’s competitors. A big data analytics company that provides online retailers with price-tracking services, the Sunnyvale, Calif. firm announced on Wednesday that it had raised $8.5 million from Madrona Venture Group and Trinity Ventures that will help it expand its operations and offerings.