Chris Barbin and the business of backing people

Chris Barbin had money to spend. Appirio had closed its Series A with Sequoia Capital, and its first-time chief executive was eager to put the capital to work. Then board member Jim Goetz called him to Sand Hill Road. The occasion was Sequoia’s now-famous “RIP Good Times” presentation. It was 2008. The economy had other plans for his enthusiasm.

There is something wonderfully inconvenient about receiving a lesson in restraint just after receiving a cheque. Barbin remembers that moment because the people around the table helped Appirio through the financial crisis. Their experience mattered when his own was still accumulating. Years later, he would build an investment firm around the usefulness of having those people within reach.

Today, the Chicago-based founder and CEO of Tercera backs technology services businesses. These are the firms that turn a software purchase into something a customer can actually use. His career has taken him through enterprise software, a cloud consultancy, a global culture role and venture investing. The recurring interest is the work between the product demonstration and the working business.

The business behind the software

Barbin graduated from Bates College in 1993 with a degree in political science. His early career included Grainger Consulting Services, where he worked from 1995 to 1999 and became a managing director specializing in e-commerce. He then joined webMethods in November 1999, initially as director of professional services. Within months, he was its vice president of professional services.

The timing gave him a close view of the internet boom and its subsequent correction. Leading global services at webMethods, he watched a company’s valuation rise dramatically before the dot-com bubble burst. His later advice to founders would return to fundamentals: the market’s enthusiasm is cyclical, while the bills tend to keep arriving with admirable punctuality.

Borland followed, including a spell as chief information officer. These jobs placed him on both sides of the enterprise technology relationship: supplying expertise and making decisions inside a software company. In 2006, he co-founded Appirio with Narinder Singh, Glenn Weinstein and Mike O’Brien. Their business helped organizations adopt cloud applications, including Salesforce and, as the company developed, Workday and Google technologies.

Cloud computing promised a different way to buy and operate software. Customers still needed help changing processes, connecting systems and getting employees to use the new tools. Appirio built its business in that gap. The work required technical knowledge, but also the less photogenic skill of understanding what a customer was trying to accomplish.

A dispersed company needs a rhythm

One of Appirio’s practical problems was how to keep people connected when they were working in different places. Barbin’s answer included a regular rhythm: virtual all-hands meetings every two weeks, weekly meetings for senior leaders and quarterly gatherings in person. Questions were welcome. The distance between employees made deliberate communication part of the job.

In discussing those years with leadership coach Mike Robbins, Barbin emphasized developing people inside the organization. He also argued that leaders had to make room for difficult conversations. Constantly upbeat messaging could prevent a company from dealing with what needed attention. A cheerful meeting is pleasant; a useful meeting sometimes has to spoil the mood.

That is a revealing emphasis for someone whose industry is often described in numbers of employees and billable hours. A consultant carries knowledge, customer relationships and judgment. Keeping that person informed, giving them room to speak and helping them grow has consequences for the service a company can deliver. Culture becomes visible in the small operating decisions.

His interest in changing consulting extended to how work was organized. In 2015, Appirio raised $35 million in a Series E round and hired former Amazon executive Alex Castro as CTO to develop its services platform. The ambition included giving customers and partners more direct access to expertise, reusable assets and its community of designers, developers and data scientists.

The sale, and the job after the sale

On October 20, 2016, Wipro announced an agreement to acquire Appirio for $500 million. Its announcement listed 1,250 employees worldwide and offices in Indianapolis, San Francisco, Dublin, London, Jaipur and Tokyo. Clients included Coca-Cola, eBay, Facebook, Home Depot and Sony PlayStation. A company founded a decade earlier had become part of a much larger technology services business.

Barbin would lead the expanded cloud business. The announcement also carried endorsements from Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Workday’s Aneel Bhusri, a reminder that a consultancy’s relationships with software companies can be central to its growth. Appirio’s expertise made those platforms more useful to customers; the platforms, in turn, created work for Appirio.

He did not immediately disappear into a leisurely post-sale life. In May 2018, he stepped down as Appirio’s CEO to become Wipro’s global culture officer. The assignment gave his long-running interest in teams a different scale. Practices developed inside a cloud consultancy now had to find a place within a global organization.

The move also makes his subsequent career easier to understand. Selling a company had given him an outcome, but the work of building organizations still held his attention. Boards and a venture partner role at GGV Capital followed. So did smaller entrepreneurial projects, including SipTequila. The subjects changed; his appetite for starting things survived.

Life on the lake had a time limit

By October 2020, Barbin was describing a familiar founder’s predicament: he had enjoyed a slower pace and wanted to build again. Friends and advisers were nudging him toward running a software business. He kept coming back to professional services. Software attracted attention and attractive exit economics, but people still had to build, deploy and use it.

He had several possible routes back in. He could start another consultancy, join one as an executive or invest in firms and help them grow. His board and venture experiences had shown him how much he enjoyed supporting other builders. That discovery widened the ambition beyond a second version of Appirio.

Research into roughly 20 software vendors and around 7,500 services partners helped shape Tercera. The firm entered a soft launch in October 2020 and formally launched in 2021. Its name is Spanish for “third,” reflecting its original focus on the cloud’s third wave. Capital, advice and industry connections were intended to travel together.

“I wanted to build something again.”

Chris Barbin, reflecting on the decision that led to Tercera

A familiar colleague, a different mountain

Hakkoda offers a concrete example of how Barbin uses relationships accumulated over his career. In 2021, Tercera helped build a consultancy focused on Snowflake. That departed from its usual pattern of backing established services companies preparing for their next stage of growth. Here, the opportunity called for assembling a company from the beginning.

For the CEO role, Barbin thought of Erik Duffield, who had run Appirio’s global services team and later succeeded him as CEO. Duffield was then at Deloitte Digital. Their shared history provided a starting point for the conversation, while Duffield’s experience with Snowflake gave the proposed business a reason to exist.

The founding team included other former Appirio colleagues. Hakkoda developed a delivery presence in Costa Rica and reached 26 employees in less than five months. The episode gives substance to the rather slippery investment word “connections.” In this case, it meant knowing who had done relevant work, remembering how they worked and bringing them into a new setting.

By Tercera’s fourth anniversary in January 2025, Barbin reported that the team had met nearly 700 firms, invested in seven companies and helped complete six acquisitions across those investments. Its network included more than 100 services-focused advisers, with 30 formal Tercera Advisors. Those figures describe the firm at that anniversary, rather than a live count.

The invoice is part of the invention

The next change in services is already testing the assumptions of the previous one. In a 2025 conversation with Michelle Swan on the Rattle and Pedal podcast, Barbin discussed AI across the functions of a services company, alongside a renewed interest in pricing around results. Changing how a firm delivers work also changes the conversation about what customers should pay for.

He acknowledged that outcome-based pricing requires a willing buyer. A business sponsor may like the idea while procurement finds it harder to accept. The mechanics matter: a firm can believe in a new model and still need customers whose purchasing processes can accommodate it. The invoice, for all its lack of glamour, belongs in the discussion about innovation.

In April 2026, Tercera participated in Auctor’s $20 million Series A, led by Sequoia. Auctor builds an AI-native system for software implementation teams, with an initial emphasis on the early stages of projects. Barbin described fragmented documents, meetings and institutional knowledge as problems the platform aims to address. His attention had returned to the machinery behind a successful implementation.

Back in the room with first-time founders

There is another place to see Barbin applying that interest in builders: Bates. He has served as a trustee and repeatedly judged its Bobcat Ventures student pitch competition. At the 2018 event, his advice included understanding the competition and explaining how a business would make money. The questions were grounded in the ordinary demands that survive an exciting pitch.

A 1993 graduate returning to hear student pitches makes a fitting companion scene to a founder receiving advice on Sand Hill Road. The settings and stakes differ. The usefulness of someone who has already made consequential decisions remains. Experience has more than one destination: it can inform an investment committee, or improve a student’s next attempt to explain an idea.

Barbin’s September 2025 writing reduces the running of a services company to three adjustable priorities: customers, team and financials. Conditions determine which needs the most attention. That framework leaves room for judgment rather than promising a universal setting. The person holding the controls still has to notice when the situation has changed.

His career offers plenty of changes to notice. Enterprise software became cloud software. A founder became an executive inside an acquirer, then an investor. AI now asks another set of questions about delivery and pricing. Through those turns, Barbin keeps returning to the people doing the work, and to what an experienced colleague might help them see a little sooner.