At a BlueConic management offsite, Bart Heilbron was asked to write down something the company was doing well. He wrote one word: “nothing.” Cory Munchbach, who had left a research career to join his small software business, was furious. In her later telling, the exchange exposed a gap between Dutch and American expectations about feedback. A short answer had acquired a very long meaning.
It is an awkward opening for a founder’s profile, which is precisely its attraction. Nobody raises a funding round for an unsuccessful meeting. Nobody puts a misunderstanding in the investor presentation. Yet the work of repairing one can matter as much as the work that gets announced. Heilbron and Munchbach would keep working together for years. In January 2023, he would hand her the CEO job.
That gives his story an unusually human shape. A co-founder of GX Software and BlueConic, Heilbron spent much of his career helping businesses understand the people visiting their websites. Inside his own company, understanding a colleague required something a database could not conveniently supply: a conversation in which both people were prepared to reconsider what they had heard.
Before the customer had a profile
The story begins in Nijmegen, in the Netherlands. GX Software emerged in 1996 from a group of roughly twelve university students doing freelance software development. Heilbron and Martijn van Berkum were among its founders. Around 2000, the business developed Webmanager, a content management system, and moved toward selling a software product. The early web was becoming a place where companies needed to publish, update and organize their own material.
Heilbron’s responsibilities were commercial before they were chief executive. He led sales and business development at GX, then became CEO. His academic training was in communication and new media at the University of Nijmegen. That background sits comfortably beside his later work on online engagement, although a degree alone is a poor explanation for anybody’s career. Customers, colleagues and the problems arriving at the office deserve some of the credit.
Content management and customer understanding are close neighbors. One organizes what a business says; the other asks who is listening. Being good at the first does not automatically solve the second. A beautifully maintained website can still give a returning visitor the digital equivalent of a blank stare. The furniture is polished. The host has forgotten your name.
BlueConic’s platform launched in 2010. It brought together information from different places into customer profiles that marketers could use. The proposition addressed a familiar annoyance: people move between devices and channels while the businesses serving them struggle to connect those encounters. A customer experiences a single relationship. Behind the scenes, several systems may each hold a different piece of it.
A Boston address, a Dutch accent
In 2014, BlueConic moved its headquarters to Boston. Heilbron and van Berkum had deliberately chosen an American investor because they wanted to grow in the United States. Their reasoning was practical: the market was larger, and operating there would differ from selling into it from Nijmegen. The move put the founders closer to the commercial environment they wanted to understand.
There is a comfortable version of international expansion in which the important items are a map, an office address and a new sales target. The harder version includes people learning which assumptions they have packed along with their belongings. A business crosses a border in an announcement. Its working habits take longer to arrive.
Munchbach joined at the beginning of 2015 after working as an analyst at Forrester. She wanted experience operating a business. BlueConic had fewer than twenty employees, which offered ample room for that ambition. In her account of taking the job, Heilbron sent a text: “Hurry up and get here, we’ve got a dream to build.” It was an invitation with very little room for a leisurely start.
“Hurry up and get here, we’ve got a dream to build.”
Bart Heilbron, in the welcome text recalled by Cory Munchbach
That message helped give the company’s “Building the Dream” phrase its origin. Munchbach later described how the team had to work at making the sentiment real. An invitation can make someone feel wanted before their first day. Belonging after they arrive takes repeated effort. The slogan gets the shorter job.
A product finds its moment
Heilbron’s public writing kept returning to continuity. In a 2014 article, he argued for individual profiles that would allow a customer’s experience to continue when the person switched channels. The underlying frustration was easy to recognize. Starting over is tiresome in a shop; moving the inconvenience onto a screen hardly improves it.
His point also involved sequence. Build the individual profile before trying to orchestrate the campaign around it. Otherwise, the campaign has to make decisions with an incomplete memory. In that account, the profile was infrastructure for an ongoing relationship, rather than a souvenir collected after an interaction had ended.
By January 2020, BlueConic was announcing a $13 million Series B led by Spring Lake Equity Partners. The company’s European origins were part of its explanation for taking privacy seriously. Heilbron argued that brands needed to personalize interactions while respecting individual preferences. That was a product claim and a commercial argument about the market BlueConic intended to serve.
A financing milestone during Heilbron’s tenure. Company funding, not a measure of personal wealth.
There were concrete customers behind the pitch. In October 2021, BlueConic described its work with HEINEKEN USA on first-party data and direct consumer engagement. The project helped earn shortlist places in Digiday and ExchangeWire awards. For a company selling the ability to connect scattered information, a named customer provided a more useful illustration than another diagram full of arrows.
Vista Equity Partners announced a strategic growth investment in January 2022. Existing investors would remain minority shareholders. The announcement said more than 300 companies worldwide used BlueConic, naming Hearst Newspapers, Heineken, ING, T-Mobile and VF Corporation. The transaction’s value was not disclosed. Its significance to Heilbron’s story lies in the company’s progression from Dutch origins to an organization attracting a software-focused investment firm.
Two people, fewer assumptions
Growth also changes the job inside the building. In her account of working with Heilbron, Munchbach described a deliberate division of responsibilities as her leadership role developed. The arrangement needed to become clearer as the company grew. They left room to adjust, but people needed to know who was responsible for what.
She also described the trust between them as something earned through difficult discussions. Their different expectations did not vanish with familiarity. They continued to notice occasions when one was being especially American or especially Dutch. In her telling, working through that friction made them more intentional. The important detail is the work, rather than a comforting assumption that difference produces a benefit all by itself.
The whiteboard episode belongs in that context. It shows how quickly a leader’s words can become another person’s verdict on their own efforts. An intention does not arrive with a guarantee that it will be understood. In a growing business, the consequences of that gap spread beyond the two people speaking.
BlueConic’s 2022 year-end account recorded Munchbach’s promotion to president and COO, alongside customer meetings in London and Boston. Organizational charts have a dry reputation, but this one was moving toward a consequential change. A colleague who had arrived to learn the operating side of a startup was assuming more of its leadership.
The chair changes hands
On January 5, 2023, Munchbach published her first message as CEO. She looked back to an office above a diner near Boston’s South Station and a distinctly unreliable elevator. Her recollection counted 2,550 days, hundreds of new customers and nearly a hundred platform releases. The precision gave the transition an everyday scale: years assembled from individual days of work.
Heilbron’s own announcement endorsed her and thanked a long list of people. Alongside co-founders and early investors were Vista partners, board members, customers, partners and employees. He described Munchbach as his co-pilot over the preceding eight years. The farewell made the relationship visible, and it distributed credit across the people who had carried the company with him.
Contemporaneous reporting said Heilbron would remain a board advisor. Later that year, he was nominated in the CxO category of the Computable Awards. Those are useful markers for the end of his executive chapter. The more revealing marker is the person who followed him into the role, after years close enough to see both the promise and the awkward meetings.
A founder’s departure can be read as a test of what has been built around the founder. Can responsibility move? Can another person make the decisions? Will the relationships bear the change? Heilbron’s handover gives those questions a specific setting and a specific successor. It lets the story continue beyond his occupancy of the office.
The product promised businesses a better memory for their customers. The leadership story is about learning to hear a colleague, share responsibility and then entrust her with the title. Somewhere between that word on the whiteboard and the announcement in January, the welcome text had become a company another person could lead.