John Sperry and the Trouble with Averages

An average can be a wonderfully polite way of ignoring somebody. Nine diners leave happy; the tenth goes home annoyed. The restaurant’s score looks respectable. The tenth diner has no particular reason to celebrate. John Sperry built a company around that awkward gap between a number that reassures the office and an experience that sends a customer elsewhere.

In 2011, while running Mindshare Technologies, he described his central idea as “The core focus is in the value of one.” A bad dinner did not become less irritating because other tables enjoyed theirs. His software connected individual feedback with the people who could respond. An untidy restaurant bathroom, for instance, could trigger a message to the local manager. The customer had spoken. Somebody could fetch a mop.

That modest destination gives Sperry’s career its shape. Mindshare became InMoment. He moved from founding CEO to chief scientist and chairman, then left and co-founded Halosight. Across the changes of name, job and technology, he has kept returning to the distance between hearing a customer and doing something useful. It is a long career spent asking a short, rather inconvenient question: and then?

A company financed at home

Mindshare started in 2002 with about $40,000. Sperry and a friend refinanced their homes to assemble the money. The first ten employees worked without pay and contributed funding themselves. By 2011, the business had 85 people and was on track for $18 million in annual revenue. The operation had moved a considerable distance from the family balance sheet.

The origins matter because every decision made with scarce money has an audience. A feature has to justify the work. A customer has to see a reason to pay. For a business selling feedback, usefulness had an especially plain meaning: put the information close enough to the problem that somebody could act. A complaint about one location would be wasted if it merely decorated a report about the whole chain.

Sperry came to entrepreneurship with experience in enterprise technology, including a senior vice president role at SunGard. His education included business studies at Brigham Young University and an MBA at the University of Utah. Large systems were familiar territory. Mindshare brought that systems thinking down to the scale of a particular interaction, where a customer’s words could carry more practical weight than a carefully rounded score.

When listening crossed borders

In September 2013, Mindshare acquired Empathica. The deal joined customer-feedback technology with social customer-experience tools and expanded the business’s reach in North America and Europe. The announcement put the combined operation at more than 200,000 locations and business units worldwide. It projected that the two companies would have collected more than 300 million customer reviews between them by the end of that year.

Those figures describe a different sort of problem from the early restaurant complaint. Listening at that scale requires ways to recognize patterns without losing the particulars. The individual remains important, but there are now enough individuals to bury a manager in reading. Technology must help decide what deserves attention and where that attention should go.

The company took the name InMoment. Sperry’s work had acquired an international stage, along with the ordinary complications of combining businesses. The product could become more capable while the organization became harder to hold together. The two jobs belonged on the same agenda: customers needed to be heard, and the people building the listening machinery needed reasons to stay invested in it.

Buddy the Elf joins the executive team

At the company’s 2015 Christmas party, Sperry dressed as Buddy from Elf. He handed candy to employees’ children, posed for photographs and spent time getting to know their families. Employees also received $500 Costco gift cards. Corporate appreciation, in this case, came with a shopping trip and a founder prepared to surrender his dignity to the costume department.

The incident fits the way colleagues described him. InMoment president Lonnie Mayne spoke of loyalty, trust and an enthusiasm for having a good time. Sperry connected the company’s culture to its beginnings: the people involved had contributed something to get the business going. Shared effort gave them a stake in keeping it alive.

“You can always pay somebody to work, but it’s really hard to get their heart,” Sperry said. The holiday appearance supplied a pleasantly literal example of meeting employees as people with lives beyond the office. A founder can discuss culture in the abstract for an hour. A child meeting an executive elf will probably remember the candy.

In 2016, Utah Business recognized him as a CEO of the Year. InMoment’s account of the award reported 118 consecutive months of profitability and more than 330 employees worldwide. Behind the party was a sustained operating record. The numbers give the warmth some substance: there was a business to maintain, as well as a room to entertain.

One customer.
One conversation.
One reason to act.THE THREAD THROUGH TWO COMPANIES

The founder changes chairs

On March 8, 2017, InMoment announced Andrew Joiner as its new chief executive. Sperry became chief scientist and chairman. Joiner brought experience running software businesses and working with unstructured information, the sprawling category that includes customers’ comments, emails and spoken words. Sperry’s responsibilities shifted toward future innovation.

The change made a distinction that founder stories sometimes blur. Creating a company and leading each later stage can require different arrangements. Sperry stayed involved while another executive took the operating role. The transition gave technical exploration a named place at the top of the organization, alongside the work of managing growth.

That December, he used a driving analogy to explain where he thought customer-experience software should go. A basic speedometer had become something closer to GPS. The next step, he argued, was automation: an analyst inside the platform, continually reading customer stories and recommending actions to different people in the business.

A speedometer tells you how fast you are going. Navigation offers a route. The distinction captures his impatience with measurement alone. A dashboard can document a difficulty beautifully while leaving its owner with the same difficulty. Sperry wanted the software to help with the next move. The report needed somewhere to go after the presentation ended.

Seventeen years, then another beginning

In 2019, after the Madison Dearborn transaction, Sperry announced that his direct involvement with InMoment had ended. He thanked Kurt Williams, Rich Hanks and Brad Clark, along with clients and colleagues. He pictured himself cheering from the sidelines and joked about resisting the urge to berate the referees. A farewell to seventeen years of work arrived with a sports-parent gag.

He co-founded Halosight that year. The new company concentrated on making unstructured information useful in the world of customer accounts and Salesforce. Starting again gave an old concern a different setting: a conversation might contain an opportunity or a promise, yet the record of it could remain incomplete.

A 2023 podcast introduction described his wish that he had begun his entrepreneurial journey sooner. The regret is revealing in its direction. Having built and left InMoment, he was still interested in getting on with another venture. His next company would tackle the work that takes place around the customer conversation, including the notes, commitments and follow-up that are easy to lose.

The meeting does the demonstration

In a later account of a lunch with a prospect, Sperry described discussing how veteran sales representatives adopt new tools. One representative had begun by speaking notes into Halosight after meetings, while sitting in his car. Eventually he turned it on before a meeting. When he returned to the car, the information had already been captured and organized.

Sperry had a demonstration ready during his own lunch. He had been running Halosight through the conversation and showed the prospect the resulting summary, commitments and follow-up items. The prospect laughed. The sales pitch had generated its own example while the two of them were talking.

The anecdote neatly reverses the usual software demonstration. Instead of asking an audience to imagine itself inside a polished example, the product had something to say about the discussion already under way. Its relevance depended on a recognizable task. The representative in the car wanted fewer things to reconstruct; the prospect wanted to understand what the product would actually do.

Sperry’s description of Halosight now includes updating Salesforce, logging tasks, tracking commitments and assembling an account timeline. These are the company’s stated functions. Their attraction is straightforward: the conversation should leave a usable record, and that record should help prepare the next conversation. A customer should not have to begin again because somebody forgot to type.

The next thing after the word cloud

Sperry has also looked back rather tartly at the customer-experience industry’s fondness for word clouds. Enlarging a frequently mentioned word can make a handsome slide. It leaves several questions unanswered: which customer needs help, what was promised, and who will follow through? His current ambition is to make customer conversations feed practical decisions across sales and customer operations.

Halosight began before the recent boom in conversational AI. Sperry says the company was started three years before November 2022 because its founders expected AI to make more of this work possible. His interest in automation therefore has a history. The tools have changed; the question about what happens next was already there.

There is room in this story for both the technical founder and the executive dressed as an elf. In each case, the memorable unit is a person: a customer with a specific problem, an employee with a family, a representative trying to remember a meeting. The danger of the average is that it can make those people disappear while the report continues to look quite tidy.

Sperry’s career keeps returning them to view. The early complaint needed a manager. The later conversation needs a reliable memory and a follow-up. Somewhere between those two sits an entire software business, and then another. For all the elaborate machinery, the test remains easy to understand: somebody said something that mattered. What happened after that?