Andrew Heath and the things a market cannot see

Four months at industrial auctions is an unusual way to prepare for an internet company. Andrew Heath and his co-founders paid their own way while they learned the trade, watching the business they hoped to change. It was 1999. Elsewhere, people were discovering that a website could attract investors before it attracted customers. Heath's apprenticeship involved the considerably less abstract question of how to sell somebody's surplus machinery.

The company became GoIndustry. Years later came AlphaSights, which connects businesses with people who have relevant expertise. Machinery and conversations make an odd pair of products. Yet Heath's career invites a useful comparison: a machine can sit unused because the right buyer cannot find it; experience can remain inaccessible because the right person has never been asked. Both businesses make a living by helping those encounters happen.

An education with an auction catalogue

Heath studied economics at Cambridge, worked as an associate at Boston Consulting Group from 1995 to 1997, and completed an MBA at Stanford in 1999. During business school he also spent a summer in Goldman Sachs's Principal Investment Area. It is an orderly beginning on paper: economics, consulting, business school, investment banking. The less orderly part began when he chose to build a business himself.

His GoIndustry partners included Alex Hoye and David Nahama. Hoye later recalled the founders examining about 450 possible business ideas, initially looking for an American model they could bring to Europe. They rejected the lot. Even allowing for the efficiency of a spreadsheet, that is a substantial quantity of disappointment. Their eventual choice was an online marketplace for surplus industrial equipment, founded in 1999.

The attraction was practical. Buyers and sellers already existed, as did valuable equipment and an established auction trade. The internet offered a way to connect them across distance. By 2004, GoIndustry offered a multilingual, multicurrency marketplace and services supplied through partners, including logistics, financing and inspection. Selling a machine involves rather more than posting its photograph. Someone must establish what it is, what it is worth and how it will get to its next workplace.

The machine still has to leave the building

Heath acknowledged early that the founders had been too focused on technology. The team brought in Herbert Willmy, an experienced Philips executive, as a co-chief executive. GoIndustry also acquired the established industrial auction house Karner. In a November 2000 interview, Heath discussed the ability to value and sell whole plants and businesses. The ambition required people who understood the equipment as well as people who understood the web.

There is a pleasing indignity in this sort of entrepreneurship. Software may arrange the introduction, but a factory does not become weightless because its sale has moved online. Inspection, valuation and transport survive every improvement to the interface. The early GoIndustry decisions suggest a founder learning to respect that stubborn physical world. A market becomes more useful when its operator takes responsibility for the awkward parts of the transaction.

In February 2003, Heath addressed Munich's marketing club about GoIndustry's adaptation to changed conditions. He spoke openly, and with charm, about mistakes and the changes made to correct them. Some of the original business idea had failed to work as expected. He discussed the resulting revisions to strategy. It is a revealing early appearance: an entrepreneur willing to take an audience through the repairs.

“We were initially too technology-driven.”

Andrew Heath, 2000 interview · translated from German

A seven-year route to the stock market

GoIndustry reached London's Alternative Investment Market in 2006. Hoye recalled an original plan to go public within two years; the dot-com crash intervened, and the journey took seven. The listing came through a reverse takeover. That longer timetable supplies a useful corrective to the compressed version of a founder's biography, in which an idea appears, employees multiply and a stock-market bell obligingly rings.

Heath's GoIndustry leadership ran through 2006. The business subsequently acquired DoveBid in 2008 and was acquired by Liquidity Services in 2012. Those later chapters explain the GoIndustry DoveBid name attached to his career. They also belong to a company whose history continued beyond his founding tenure. By 2008, Heath was beginning another venture, this time with Max Cartellieri, whom he had met at Stanford.

From surplus equipment to scarce answers

Cartellieri had already co-founded the consumer review business Ciao. The two founders therefore arrived at AlphaSights with experience of building internet businesses, rather than only an enthusiasm for starting one. They established the company in 2008. Its central proposition was access to human knowledge: helping professionals reach people who understood the particular business, market or problem they were trying to assess.

Consider the distinction between possessing information and being able to use it. A long report can establish that an industry exists. Someone who has worked inside that industry may explain why customers behave as they do, or which practical constraint makes an attractive plan difficult. The value of that conversation depends on a precise match. General experience and relevant experience can be separated by a very expensive distance.

AlphaSights builds its service around searching for experts to fit a client's brief and qualifying their relevance. Its account teams work with customers over time, learning their research needs and working methods. That helps explain why Heath's second business needs an extensive human operation. A request must be understood before a useful person can be found. The difficult work often begins with deciding exactly what the customer needs to learn.

The interview question that stayed

A former employee, Mark Briant, remembered an interview question associated with Heath long after the interview itself: “What's the one human quality we all have that can connect us to our customer?” The answer he recalled was curiosity. It is a small anecdote, but an unusually apt one for this business. Before an associate can help a customer find an answer, the associate has to care enough to understand the question.

Curiosity also gives the founder a less ceremonial role. It is difficult to remain curious while pretending every answer is already in your possession. Heath's early account of GoIndustry's mistakes and Briant's later recollection sit comfortably together. Read side by side, they suggest a working preference for asking, testing and revising. That is one way to read these encounters together, without reducing his career to the companies on his CV.

Another encounter involved Merel Peters after her internship at AlphaSights. She enjoyed the company, but the commercial client service role was not quite right for her. She and Heath discussed what should come next and agreed there was a place for her in the business. Peters became an operations analyst, working across teams, before moving into finance in 2015.

The detail matters because hiring stories usually end at the offer letter. This one concerns what happens when a person and an initial role do not fit neatly together. Peters's subsequent move gave her a different way to contribute. The conversation offers a concrete example of Heath engaging with that question, without requiring a grand theory about his personality. Sometimes the useful management decision is to leave room for a second attempt.

In 2017, new associates met with the founders to exchange ideas, questions and feedback. One associate, Claire Rembecki, met Cartellieri, while the practice involved both leaders. For a company selling access to experience, giving its newest employees a route to the people running it has a certain internal logic. The customer-facing colleagues may also know something the founders need to hear.

A larger business, still led by two founders

By 2019, AlphaSights described a workforce of more than 500 people and nine offices across the Americas, Europe and Asia. Its work extended beyond phone calls to meetings, workshops, surveys and written analysis. A business built around finding the right person had developed several ways for that person's knowledge to reach a client. The conversation remained central; the delivery could vary.

Today, the company reports more than 2,000 professionals in nine global cities and more than three million client-expert interactions delivered. Heath and Cartellieri continue to lead it together as co-CEOs. Those figures describe AlphaSights, rather than an individual achievement that can be assigned to either founder alone. Their continuing partnership is nevertheless a distinctive feature of Heath's career: his second venture has become a much longer shared undertaking.

The product has continued to develop around that operation. AlphaNow offers a library of expert material, including company one-pagers and investor-led call transcripts, with search tools to help clients find relevant content. There is a familiar problem here for anyone who has watched an industrial marketplace grow: bringing material into one place is only part of the job. People must also be able to locate what matters to their particular task.

The work beyond the introduction

Heath and Cartellieri's shared statement of principles puts sustained learning, customer outcomes and a long horizon at the centre of their approach. They also describe an ambition to develop future business leaders. These are joint commitments, rather than private aspirations attributed to Heath alone. They fit a company in which the work of understanding other businesses can itself become an education.

Across the two ventures, Heath has dealt with a recurring inconvenience: the world rarely arranges its useful resources for the convenience of the person who needs them. A piece of equipment has to reach a buyer. An experienced professional has to reach a question. In between sit the less glamorous obligations of running a business: checking, coordinating, listening and following through. Heath's career has given those obligations a surprisingly consistent place. The introduction is where the work becomes visible. A good deal of the work happens before it.