Robert Wahbe had a marketing problem that would have been funny if he hadn't been responsible for the marketing. His team at Microsoft was producing campaigns, training and sales material. Then he would visit an international office and ask how the work was helping. Often, the people he met had little idea what he meant. Headquarters had been talking. Somewhere on the journey to the customer, the message had gone missing.
He has described those visits as an uncomfortable education in the distance between creating something and getting someone to use it. A presentation could be finished, approved and distributed while remaining practically invisible to the salesperson who needed it. The organization possessed the answer. Finding it was another matter.
There is a certain comedy in an enterprise rich in information becoming poor in useful answers. Wahbe eventually made that contradiction his business. Highspot, which he co-founded in 2012, grew out of the everyday difficulty of putting a company's knowledge to work. Fourteen years later, its merger with Seismic closed, and Wahbe stepped back from daily operations to join the combined company's board.
The computer scientist takes a detour
Long before the sales presentations, there was computer science at Berkeley. Wahbe earned his PhD there in 1996. He also helped found Colusa Software, established in 1993, which commercialized technology for running software components securely across programming languages. Its business concerned the machinery beneath applications: how code could execute safely inside systems such as databases and operating systems.
Microsoft acquired Colusa in 1996. For Wahbe, the acquisition offered a chance to learn inside a large software company before starting something else. The intended visit stretched into sixteen years. A brief stop can acquire a remarkable amount of furniture.
His Microsoft career included engineering leadership in connected systems and, later, responsibility for marketing in the Server and Tools business. The scope included products such as Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Studio. He had moved from making underlying technology work to helping a worldwide organization explain why customers should want it.
Working under Satya Nadella gave him a view of a business whose scale made communication both necessary and difficult. The move toward marketing exposed a problem that technical quality alone could not settle: even useful knowledge had to survive the journey through a complicated organization.
- 1993Colusa Software begins
- 1996Microsoft acquires Colusa; Berkeley PhD
- 2012Highspot begins in Seattle
- 2026Seismic merger closes; board chapter begins
Old colleagues, new flat-pack furniture
Wahbe turned to people he already knew. Oliver Sharp had been a fellow Berkeley graduate student. David Wortendyke had worked with them at Microsoft after meeting them in 2000. The relationships preceded the company by years, an advantage when the work ahead included deciding what the company should actually become.
Wahbe remembers the first office as a small blue house in a Seattle neighborhood. Wortendyke remembers trips to Ikea, choosing desks and couches, hauling them back and assembling the office themselves. These were experienced software builders whose new operation still required somebody to deal with the furniture.
In their account of Highspot's origins, the founders return to the busy salesperson with seconds to find something useful. A large enterprise might have an enormous collection of product material. The practical search method could still be an email to a friend. Anyone who has asked a colleague for the current version of a document will recognize the arrangement.
A search box needed a purpose
Highspot's early proposition was broader than sales. Wahbe's introductory product essay described a cloud service for collecting and sharing an organization's working knowledge. It would handle formal material, such as presentations, alongside the less tidy knowledge people accumulate through experience. The ambition was to make an organization better at using information it already had.
The proposed ingredients included familiar consumer web experiences, a knowledge graph, machine learning and cloud delivery. Search mattered, but so did discovering information a person had not known to request. Documents could be previewed, collected and shared in context. The interface had to invite use; an ingenious filing system offers limited comfort if everyone avoids opening it.
Sales became a particularly useful focus for that broader idea. As Highspot investor Tim Porter later recalled, the founders began with the difficulty of internal enterprise search and found an important use case in sales and go-to-market teams. Finding content could become part of a larger workflow around preparing for and engaging a buyer.
That narrowing mattered. A general complaint about inaccessible information had become a problem attached to an identifiable team and its daily work. There was now someone to ask whether the product helped.
A conceptual map of Highspot's founding problem, rather than a measured funnel.
The customer gets a vote
Wahbe has been fairly direct about the anxiety underneath a startup. Would companies spend money and time on the product? And if they did, could the advantage last? Research and conversations helped, but customers choosing the software supplied a more demanding verdict.
During Highspot's early years, he says, customer conversations were constant. They helped shape the product and the language used to describe it. He also wanted development to be iterative and collaborative, with design receiving serious attention. His earlier experience had shown him that software could sell without being particularly pleasant to use. Highspot was a chance to put ease of use closer to the center.
Large organizations adopting the product and reporting useful results gave him evidence that the idea worked beyond a demonstration. His definition of success stayed close to that test: whether the software added value to customers' businesses. It is a pleasantly inconvenient standard for a software founder. The person paying gets to participate in the assessment.
“No matter how great your ideas are, you need the right people.”
Robert Wahbe, January 2022
When the spreadsheets arrived
By January 2022, Highspot had raised a $248 million Series F round, led by B Capital Group and D1 Capital Partners. Its reported post-money valuation reached $3.5 billion. Total funding stood at $648 million. The company said it had more than 800 employees, compared with 400 two years earlier.
Those figures describe a company at a particular moment. The valuation was the financing round's valuation; it was never a statement of Wahbe's personal wealth. The funding gave the business resources for product development, international expansion and hiring.
The sales environment was changing, too. Wahbe described buyers and sellers doing more business through video calls, making attention harder to hold and preparation more consequential. Highspot's customers included companies such as DocuSign, Workday and Adobe. A product that had begun around making knowledge accessible was operating inside substantial sales organizations.
Fundraising acquired a different character as the business grew. Wahbe later described early meetings centered on the team and the possible market. With an established company, the discussion moved toward margins, customer departures and profit. Investors might arrive with a lengthy report. The rented-house whiteboard had gained a rather demanding audience.
Respect, down to slide four
Wahbe's view of company culture includes an unusually practical question: how difficult is it to get ordinary work done? Respect and positive values matter, but so do clear responsibilities and usable tools. A workplace can be friendly while making a simple task unnecessarily exhausting.
He noticed that people arriving from Amazon carried its leadership principles into everyday language. Highspot adopted its own set of eleven guiding principles. They included attention to detail and the abbreviation MRI, meaning “most respectful interaction.” A mistake on a slide or a strained exchange could become a specific conversation about a shared expectation.
He is also candid about public speaking. In a 2022 podcast conversation, he distinguished the ease of talking about work he cared about from the preparation involved in performing on a large stage. He admired natural storytellers without claiming membership in their club. For an executive who had led marketing, it was a useful admission: communication can be something you work at.
The board seat after the blue house
By October 2025, Highspot was introducing Deal Agent, designed to bring information about sellers and buyers into ongoing conversations with an AI assistant. The company described guidance tailored to different roles and to the circumstances of a deal. The vocabulary had evolved considerably from the early knowledge-management pitch, while the question of getting useful help into daily work remained recognizable.
Seismic and Highspot announced their merger agreement in February 2026. The completed combination, announced on August 18, operates under the Seismic name, led by Rob Tarkoff. At closing, it reported 2,500 customers and 3.5 million users worldwide. Wahbe's role shifted to the board.
Reflecting on the merger on LinkedIn, Wahbe recalled four people, no funding, a rented living room and a Costco whiteboard. He emphasized the colleagues who had spent their energy and built their careers at Highspot, including the difficult periods when the team pulled together. His stated purpose continued to be changing how millions of people work.
The whiteboard is a good object to leave in the picture. It belongs to the part of company building before a polished explanation exists, when rough ideas still need other people to challenge them. Wahbe's career has encompassed secure software, a long Microsoft apprenticeship and a business built around helping colleagues find what they need. The missing sales pitch gave him a question worth carrying beyond the rental house.