In Medallia’s reception area, Borge Hald kept a library with an unusually narrow selection. Hundreds of copies of Carol Dweck’s Mindset stood on the shelves. New employees received the book. Visitors received the book. A person could arrive to discuss enterprise software and leave with homework. For a founder selling companies a way to learn from their customers, it was a remarkably consistent welcome.
The scene, at the company’s new San Mateo offices in 2017, tells us something about Hald’s ambitions. Customer feedback was his business, but learning was his preoccupation. A complaint should change what happened next. So should a mistake, a difficult conversation or an investor’s unflattering assessment. The software could deliver the message. People still had to be willing to hear it.
That sounds agreeable until the feedback concerns your own company. Hald had spent years building Medallia with his wife and co-founder, Amy Pressman. He had a substantial business before institutional investors arrived. Yet when a prospective investor told him his sales effort needed serious work, he chose the critic. Apparently, the reception-area reading assignment applied to the founder too.
A long way from the bunker
Hald grew up in Bekkestua, in Norway’s Bærum municipality, the son of a teacher. During military service, sitting in a bunker in Kautokeino, he began considering a different future. Temperatures outside reached minus 47 degrees Celsius. There are many ways to develop an interest in international education; a Norwegian winter offers a persuasive prospectus.
He applied to universities abroad and won a scholarship to the University of Michigan. He earned a BBA in statistics, then an MBA at Stanford. His working life included Procter & Gamble, Morgan Stanley and Boston Consulting Group. The route combined numbers, large organizations and the consulting habit of asking how a business actually works.
At Stanford he met Pressman. They later worked as consultants in Norway and moved to the San Francisco area in 1999. Their eventual enterprise was rooted in a familiar irritation of consulting life: spending a great deal of time in hotels that seemed to know how often you stayed, yet surprisingly little about whether you enjoyed it.
A loyalty record can make an unhappy guest look wonderfully loyal. The transaction continues; the dissatisfaction goes elsewhere. In the founders’ experience, repeat visits did not mean the hotel understood the guest. The gap between those two things became Medallia’s opportunity.
The customer had already spoken
Medallia began operating in 2001, following its incorporation in 2000. Hald and Pressman set out to make service businesses more responsive to the people using them. The initial focus was hotels. It was an industry they knew as customers, and one where a large organization had to coordinate countless small encounters.
By September 2001, the pair were working from a small Palo Alto office with two bedrooms, a kitchen and a loft. The dot-com collapse had already made funding difficult. Then the September 11 attacks disrupted the travel business on which they were concentrating. A startup selling to hotels suddenly had to ask whether hotels would be buying anything.
Hilton provided a way forward. The founders had discussed a pilot with the company, and a Hilton executive called after the attacks to pursue it. They sought a contractual commitment spelling out a meaningful price for a wider rollout. A pilot would test more than the technology. It would test whether there was a paying business at the other end.
That distinction matters in Hald’s story. A polite meeting and an enthusiastic demonstration can keep a founder busy without keeping the company alive. A customer willing to pay gives the idea a different sort of examination. Medallia’s early years forced Hald and Pressman to submit to that examination repeatedly.
The company reached profitability in 2003 and spent roughly its first decade without institutional venture funding. Pressman and Hald were also raising a family. By the time of Medallia’s 2019 public offering, they had three children. Their collaboration had the peculiar feature that a discussion between co-founders could also be a discussion between spouses. Neither relationship offered much room to pretend the business was someone else’s problem.
A complaint needs an address
Hald’s explanation of the product was unusually human for enterprise software. He wanted a company to behave more like a person: notice an experience, learn from it, do something differently, and see whether the result improved. The organization needed senses, memory and a practical means of responding.
In 2013, he described his ambition for companies to earn their customers’ affection. The aspiration was warm; the mechanism was operational. Feedback had to reach the call-center employee, the store manager or the person at a hotel desk. Sending a report to headquarters was only part of the job.
“We envision a world in which companies are loved by their customers.”
Borge Hald, 2013
He described customers deploying Medallia to as many as 50,000 users inside one organization. Some were moving around all day rather than sitting in front of a computer. Mobile delivery made feedback useful where the work occurred. A manager could learn about a problem while there was still time to respond.
The scale gives the idea its difficulty. It is straightforward for the owner of a small shop to hear a complaint and fix it. In a company spread across many properties, countries and departments, information can arrive in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with nobody certain who owns the next step. Hald’s business was built around shortening that journey.
He also drew a distinction between handling an individual problem and improving the process that caused it. In 2013, he thought companies were getting better at the first task while still struggling with the second. Replacing a broken product helps one customer. Changing a faulty process can help the next thousand.
His analogy was a sports team. A coach reviews a game; the team practises in response. Businesses had more and more information about their own performance, but Hald questioned whether they had the structures and responsibility needed to practise differently. The interesting question came after the dashboard: who would organize the improvement?
The investor who brought bad news
By the time Medallia took outside investment, Hald said it had about 110 employees and $30 million in revenue. This was an established operation with a choice about whom to invite into the room. It could afford to examine the people offering money.
Doug Leone, the Sequoia partner, recalled that the founders questioned his firm before Sequoia could conduct its usual interrogation. Pressman checked an unusually large number of references. After years of financing growth through customers, they treated the selection of an investor as a decision about the company’s future working relationships.
Other firms praised Medallia. Leone challenged its sales capabilities. Hald remembered the conversation with the compact phrase, “Doug challenged us.” He chose Sequoia even though other investors offered more generous terms. Compliments are pleasant, but they make poor instructions.
Sequoia dates its partnership with Medallia to 2011. In September 2012, the company publicly announced a $35 million investment. Another $50 million round followed in August 2014, bringing Sequoia’s total investment to $105 million. The money supported product development, international offices and the infrastructure needed to serve a wider customer base.
The partnership exposed a tension in Hald’s method. Careful growth had helped Medallia survive. A bigger opportunity required more capacity to sell and deliver. Listening meant accepting that a successful way of operating could still need revision. The founder’s task was to decide which habits protected the business and which merely preserved his comfort.
Would you share an airport delay?
Hald and Pressman had a practical test for colleagues: they wanted talented, unarrogant people who helped others perform and whom they would not mind being stuck with in an airport. It is a revealing place to assess character. Nobody is especially impressive beside a cancelled departure board.
They worried that growth could damage the culture that made growth possible. A talented recruit could fill an urgent gap while making the team worse. Their approach treated the effect on colleagues as part of performance. Hiring capacity without considering that effect was a bargain whose invoice arrived later.
The copies of Mindset belong in this picture. Hald wanted learning to be an expectation, visible from the moment someone joined. A book cannot guarantee behavior, of course. It can make the expectation harder to miss. Medallia’s founder had chosen a rather literal way to put it on the shelf.
Making room for the next operator
In August 2018, Hald handed the CEO role to Leslie Stretch, previously the chief executive of CallidusCloud. Hald became executive chairman and chief strategy officer. The change came before Medallia’s July 2019 listing on the New York Stock Exchange, and after more than seventeen years with Hald as CEO.
He praised Stretch’s experience running a public company and his interest in customer experience. The succession gave Hald a different relationship with the company he had built. The person who had spent years directing it could focus on strategy while another executive managed its next stage.
Medallia’s subsequent history has included a $6.4 billion acquisition by Thoma Bravo, completed in October 2021. In August 2026, it completed a recapitalization that reduced debt, supplied $150 million in new capital and transferred ownership to a group led by Blackstone-managed funds, Apollo and FS KKR Capital Corp. Those are later chapters in the company’s history, after Hald’s tenure as CEO.
Hald’s work also extends into investing. Turing Labs, which builds software for consumer-product research and development, publicly lists him among its investors. His LinkedIn profile associates him with Berrypick and places him in Palo Alto. The builder has also become a backer of other builders.
Still, the most revealing image may be that reception-area bookshelf. A founder can ask customers to speak, ask employees to listen, and ask an investor for advice. The difficult part is allowing an answer to change the plan. Hald made a business out of moving information toward action. The homework began at the door.
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