Jon Ferrara and
the things we forget

Jon Ferrara kept the tickets. For more than fifty years, the small scraps that proved he had been at a concert accumulated: a shoebox, then a drawer, then boxes. Eventually, the co-founder of GoldMine and founder of Nimble gave them a website. It is an unusually personal project for someone whose professional life has revolved around contact databases. Or perhaps it is exactly the project you would expect.

The archive runs from 1972 into 2026. Visitors can search by artist, venue, year, and the people he went with. More revealing is the invitation attached to it: friends can say they were there, supply a forgotten opener, or recover an evening that has slipped out of view. Ferrara has done the tidying. Other people can bring back the company.

There is a familiar problem inside this collection. A person remembers something important, but the details live in several places. Another person holds a missing piece. Connect those pieces and the memory becomes more useful. Ferrara has spent much of his working life giving businesses a way to do that. The concert archive simply comes with better music.

A salesperson with too many pieces of paper

His route into software passed through sales, a profession he had once hoped to avoid. His first job was on his father’s car lot. He later recalled wanting two things: never to work for his father again and never to be in sales. He managed the first. The second ambition had to make room for a career.

Ferrara studied computer science at California State University, Northridge. He also worked in a computer store, which gave him a practical acquaintance with business software. By the late 1980s, he was selling enterprise networking technology at Banyan. The job brought him paper leads, names to call, appointments to record, and a monthly forecast to assemble.

His notes went on the lead sheet. Appointments went in a Day-Timer. Forecasts went into a spreadsheet. Email and telephone carried messages to colleagues. Each tool did a job. Getting them to agree about one customer was a separate occupation, for which nobody had thoughtfully cleared space in the calendar.

The frustration extended beyond his own desk. Sales engineers, managers, and product colleagues also touched the account. Ferrara wanted a shared record of what had happened and what should happen next. He knew enough about the available software to look for a solution. When he could not find the combination he wanted, he left Banyan and joined a college friend, Elan Susser, to build it.

GoldMine began in a San Fernando Valley apartment in 1989. Its organizing idea was shared contact information linked to communication, calendars, and sales activity. The person answering a customer’s call should have access to the history, even if somebody else had handled the previous conversation. That is a plain expectation. Making it work across a team required software.

Selling to the people who already had the keys

Building GoldMine left Ferrara with another question: how would people discover it? His answer was shaped by the networking business he knew. Novell resellers already helped companies put computers together. They had installed the infrastructure on which a shared contact manager could run, and their customers already turned to them for technical advice.

Ferrara called those resellers and encouraged them to use GoldMine. Familiarity came before recommendation. His logic was practical: advisers recommend products they understand through use. A reseller who managed its own business with GoldMine could explain the product from experience.

“people sell what they know and they know what they use.”

Jon Ferrara, on GoldMine’s reseller strategy

This was distribution through an existing web of trust. Rather than expect every small business to discover a new software company independently, GoldMine reached people already advising those businesses. Ferrara’s account combines the telephone work with public relations and guerrilla marketing. Relationships carried the product outward; the product gave those relationships something useful to carry.

Recognition followed. Ferrara received Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year recognition in 1997. GoldMine appeared at number 154 on that year’s Inc. 500 and collected PC Magazine Editors’ Choice awards during the 1990s. These were signs that an apartment project had become an established software business, with customers well beyond the founders’ immediate circle.

Ferrara describes financing GoldMine without venture capital or bank loans. Bootstrapping meant the business had to support its ambitions through the way it operated and sold. His later explanations of growth keep returning to the same practical subjects: useful tools, credible recommendations, and people who could introduce the company to other people.

Three startups at home

After selling GoldMine, Ferrara spent roughly a decade raising his three children. He has referred to them as three startups, a founder’s joke with a rather good understanding of how little control a founder sometimes has. The change gave him time with the people whose lives had continued while he was building the company.

When he returned to software, the problem arrived through his own use of social media. By 2009, conversations and contacts were scattered across a growing set of online places. A person might be familiar on one service, connected on another, and present in an inbox under a name that supplied very little context.

He wanted a relationship manager that brought those fragments together. Nimble’s official biography dates its founding to 2009. Its premise connected contact management with social listening, engagement, and collaboration. The question from his Banyan days had survived the intervening years: how does a team keep track of the people with whom it is working?

Technology had multiplied the places where an introduction could happen. It had also multiplied the opportunities to lose the thread. Nimble addressed that fragmentation by gathering relationship information around contacts. Ferrara was returning to a familiar subject, with a different set of channels and a new company to build.

The network giveth

The new environment introduced a complication. Software that connects to larger platforms depends on decisions made by those platforms. Nimble’s early connections to services such as LinkedIn and Facebook were useful, but access could change. Ferrara later discussed having to rebuild when those connections were curtailed.

For a relationship software founder, that is a particularly pointed business problem. Your product helps customers maintain continuity; your own company must handle a break in continuity imposed elsewhere. It also explains why his story includes partnerships and distribution as well as features. A useful application needs a way to reach customers and keep working around them.

Ferrara’s criticism of conventional CRM centers on who benefits from using it. Managers want reports and forecasts. People working with customers need context and help following through. He argues that the relationship history should serve the whole company, including colleagues whose work never appears as a sales opportunity.

In that view, a contact can be a partner, a journalist, a supplier, or somebody who may become important much later. A database organized only around imminent transactions can overlook that wider constituency. Ferrara keeps asking for a record that remains useful before a deal exists and after the immediate sale is over.

Dinner before the dashboard

His approach to finding common ground has a memorable list: family, friends, food, fun, and fellowship. The Five Fs give him a way to explain the ordinary subjects through which people get to know each other. They also leave considerable room for a meal, which is a merciful feature in any business framework.

Ferrara describes looking at the books, records, photographs, and objects around another person as clues to a conversation. Online profiles can supply similar openings. The interest matters because it belongs to the person. Used carelessly, the same information could turn an introduction into a performance of familiarity.

He has built visibility for Nimble by sharing work from people discussing social sales and marketing, crediting them, and responding to the conversations that followed. In his account, those exchanges became relationships; some of those people tried the software and began telling others about it. The method required attention before it produced an audience.

Teaching runs through his explanation of why he does this. He has used chess as an example: teaching others to play helped him improve. His ambitions for software follow a similar pattern. Help somebody do their work more effectively, and that person may be better equipped to help someone else.

A bell on the digital door

In May 2026, Ferrara announced Nimble Web Chat. A website conversation could create a CRM contact automatically and place the exchange in that person’s history. He compared the arrival of a visitor to the bell on a storefront door. The metaphor suits a founder whose first work experience involved an actual place where customers arrived.

The feature gives his long-running question a current form. Somebody asks a question on a website. A colleague follows up later. The record needs to connect those moments, so the second conversation can continue the first. Across the decades, the technical details have changed more dramatically than the human expectation.

His concert archive makes that expectation pleasantly visible. The entries can be sorted and cleaned, but another attendee may still remember something he does not. A date and a band name create the beginning of a record. The person who says they were there adds something a database could never have invented.

Ferrara is still building places for those details to survive. Sometimes the detail is a customer’s question. Sometimes it is the friend standing beside you when the band starts. Keeping it lets the next conversation begin a little further along.