Pete
Koomen

There are founders who have one company in them. Pete Koomen is not that kind of founder. Before Optimizely changed how the internet makes decisions, there was CarrotSticks - a math learning game for kids that Pete built with Dan Siroker in 2009. It did not work. Less than a year later, the pair were sitting in a Y Combinator office with a pitch for a social discount platform for merchants. That didn't work either.

Week two of YC. New idea. They'd pivot to A/B testing - tools to help companies run the kind of experiments that Dan had seen work firsthand on the 2008 Obama campaign, where simple website tests had meaningfully moved fundraising numbers. The whole history of Optimizely rests on that decision made in a Y Combinator office before the batch was two weeks old.

What Pete brought to Optimizely was the engineering and product instinct of someone who had spent three years at Google launching Google App Engine - a product that reached 150,000 developers. He understood scale. He understood what it meant to build infrastructure that other people build on top of. That sensibility shaped Optimizely's product: not a one-off testing tool but a platform where entire organizations could embed scientific thinking into their daily product decisions.

By 2014, Optimizely had raised $57 million in venture capital and was serving approximately 8,000 enterprise customers - Disney, Starbucks, Crate & Barrel among them. The company expanded into Japan. Pete was building both the product and the culture simultaneously, deliberately establishing values (Ownership, Passion, Trust, Integrity, Fearlessness, Transparency) early, then evolving them as the company crossed 400 employees. When the company needed a dedicated CEO, Pete brought in Jay Larson and continued to lead product and engineering. In 2020, Optimizely was acquired by Episerver. ARR had exceeded $100 million.

Early at Optimizely, Pete and Dan Siroker ran a competition to see who could close the bigger enterprise deal. Pete signed a customer at $8,000 per month. Dan countered with $12,000 per month. These aren't the numbers - the detail is that two technical founders were out selling enterprise software before they'd built a proper sales team, and turning it into a game. That competitive energy is partly how Optimizely got traction.

The founding story has its own wrinkle: the idea they brought to Y Combinator - a social discount platform for merchants - was discarded two weeks in. Most founders who join YC have spent months on their idea before showing up. Pete and Dan arrived, looked at the feedback, and changed direction almost immediately. The pivot to A/B testing came from Dan's Obama campaign experience and Pete's engineering instinct about what was actually hard to build well. They bet on difficulty as a moat.

Outside the startup world: Pete is a rock climber who has summited El Capitan - the 3,000-foot granite wall in Yosemite that serves as the backdrop for Alex Honnold's free solo. He does not describe it as a metaphor for entrepreneurship. He describes himself, plainly, as "a father, husband and occasional rock climber." The understatement is probably the point.