Tim Albinson had chosen an awkward moment to leave a good job. The day before his planned resignation from Goldman Sachs, a rival online business marketplace called Big Vine launched with backing from Kleiner Perkins. His idea suddenly had well-funded company. He went ahead anyway, then returned to Goldman two days later to pitch senior colleagues on investing in his own venture, ExchangeWave. A resignation, apparently, need not be the end of the conversation.
That was the opening move. The more consequential decision came after the launch, when the dot-com market collapsed and corporate technology budgets tightened. Building the marketplace exposed another problem: the enormous difficulty of managing information about suppliers. Albinson changed course. ExchangeWave became Aravo, and the underlying administrative headache became the business.
There is something pleasingly unromantic about this origin. Supplier records do not usually feature in entrepreneurial daydreams. Yet the detour explains much of Albinson’s working life: finance, enterprise software, conservation, and a willingness to spend time on the machinery that lets an institution function.
A very inconvenient launch
The company began in 2000. By winter 2004, Albinson’s venture was serving organizations including Accenture, the Department of Defense, and the US Navy. Fellow Berkeley Haas graduate Che Mott was part of its founding story. The firm had raised $5 million and was developing software to automate supplier relationships. It had already travelled a considerable distance from the online exchange that first sent Albinson out of the bank.
A marketplace needs participants. It also needs reliable information about those participants. Names, accounts, credentials, and changing details must remain usable across the systems of the companies doing business together. Aravo took that less conspicuous requirement seriously. Suppliers could maintain their own information through a web-based service, while the platform helped keep a customer’s data synchronized.
The logic is easy to recognize outside software. A dinner party requires more than an attractive invitation: someone must know who is coming and whether there are enough chairs. Multiply the guest list into hundreds of thousands of business relationships, and the seating plan begins to deserve a company of its own.
The education behind the detour
Albinson’s undergraduate degree was in English Literature at the University of Colorado Boulder. He later earned an MBA at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, graduating in 1999. An institutional biography records that he was a Walter A. Haas Scholar and student body president. Literature, finance, and student government make a rather more varied preparation than the familiar image of a software founder alone with a keyboard.
His work at Goldman Sachs placed him in New York, in Institutional Client Services within the FICC division. He also worked as an associate at Core-Capital Partners. Before Aravo, he founded and led Adelante Consulting Group, advising large corporations and conservation organizations on sustainability and cause-related marketing.
That last piece matters. Sustainability was already part of his career before it became a feature of his software. In the early 1990s, he helped develop strategies for Eddie Bauer and Timberland. His conservation work included organizations such as The Nature Conservancy, American Forests, and Fundación Natura in Ecuador. The later supplier products had a connection to earlier work with actual companies and environmental groups.
The connection need not be dressed up as destiny. A literature degree does not predict a supplier database. Conservation consulting does, however, introduce a practical question that returns throughout this career: how can a large organization turn a commitment into something it can administer?
He also wrote about sustainability on a blog called 2Sustain and taught entrepreneurship and startup finance at UC Berkeley Extension. Both activities involved explaining ideas outside the immediate demands of running Aravo. They give the career a public-facing dimension: alongside building products and raising capital, he spent time writing and teaching about the subjects that occupied him. A classroom and a company ask for different kinds of explanation, even when the subject is the same new venture.
Half a million reasons to get the records right
In 2008, Aravo’s work with General Electric gave that question a formidable scale. The implementation began in March. By the announcement later that year, GE was managing more than 500,000 suppliers through Aravo’s platform, which had gone live in six languages. GE’s chief information officer, Gary Reiner, described the expected benefits in terms of cost, accuracy, compliance, and productivity.
The figures help explain why Albinson’s detour mattered. At that scale, supplier information is a working infrastructure. A detail that is easy to check for one vendor becomes an organizational problem when the same task repeats across countries, languages, and business units. The appeal of the software rested on making that work manageable.
The financing also continued through an uninviting market. In December 2008, Aravo announced a $7 million Series D close, with plans to increase sales, engineering, and delivery capacity. A year later, it announced a $27 million Series D round with Cisco as the largest participant and a new strategic investor. That announcement put total investment at $50 million.
The two announcements describe stages of the Series D financing; they are not two unrelated windfalls to add together. The investors included Charles Schwab/Big Sky Partners and former Goldman Sachs chairman Stephen Friedman. Cisco brought a proposed product relationship as well as money: the companies planned to integrate WebEx technologies to support collaboration between buyers and suppliers.
The promise and the paperwork
By 2007, Aravo had launched Sustain, a software service for managing corporate sustainability programs. In 2008, Albinson was scheduled to join a Forbes/Ethisphere panel on supply-chain sustainability at the Rainbow Room in New York. His subject was the business use of technology in ethical sourcing and environmental programs. It linked his consulting past to the company he was running.
A supplier policy needs a way to collect information, review it, and follow up. Otherwise, a company may have an admirable position and a remarkably hazy view of whether anyone is carrying it out. This is the practical territory Albinson occupied. The work included supplier and factory audits, procurement programs, and the records required to support them.
Risk became another part of that territory. Aravo introduced Aravo Risk in 2009. Albinson described a system in which suppliers maintained information online and buyers could assess it through scorecards and rankings. Suppliers needing attention could enter corrective-action workflows, allowing customers to track whether they responded and changed their practices.
“They need a supporting technology.”Tim Albinson, discussing supplier management at GE’s scale, 2009
In February 2010, the company offered a smaller first step: Supplier Risk QuickStart, a package advertised at $50,000 with implementation in 60 days or less. It included software, services, training, and support. The point was to give companies a defined starting place when the larger task felt difficult to begin.
Later that year, Aravo added product-level risk metrics and more integration with outside information, including Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. These details show the progression from storing a supplier’s information to asking more specific questions about the relationship. What does the supplier provide? Which parts matter most? Which credentials are approaching expiration? Each question requires something more precise than a reassuring file name.
Passing the keys, keeping a seat
Albinson appointed Michael Saracini chief operating officer in June 2010. Saracini took responsibility for day-to-day operations and the company’s go-to-market work. In April 2011, Aravo announced his appointment as CEO, while Albinson became executive chairman with a focus on strategic clients and partnerships.
The handoff was explicit. Albinson had brought the company through its founding and early development; another executive would now run it. His public remarks welcomed Saracini’s promotion and credited his contribution to product strategy and sales execution. Remaining at the board table gave the founder a continuing role without keeping every operating responsibility attached to him.
There is an organizational challenge inside that arrangement. The relationships and judgment accumulated by a founder remain useful, while daily management needs clear responsibility. Aravo’s announcement assigned Albinson a specific remit rather than simply attaching a new title to the old job. Clients and partnerships would occupy his attention. Saracini would lead company operations. The division makes this chapter legible: a business can keep its founder involved while changing who is accountable for its execution.
By 2013, Albinson had another business to discuss. He was a managing partner at Emergent Capital Partners, a real estate private equity fund focused on Southeast Asia. “Having a lot of fun building the business,” he wrote in an alumni update. He also reported moving from San Francisco to San Anselmo after 15 years in the city.
Aravo remains part of his career. Its current leadership page lists him as founder and chairman, alongside Saracini as CEO. The investment chapter expanded the range of his work rather than ending the relationship with the company he founded.
A board seat, a festival, a vintage suit
His institutional interests reach beyond business software. Albinson serves on the Newport Festivals Foundation board, the organization behind the Newport Folk and Newport Jazz festivals. His Aravo biography also lists board service with the Global Institute of Sustainability. There is a common practical demand in these different settings: established organizations still need people willing to attend to their future.
Then there is the suit. At SFMOMA’s Modern Ball in May 2016, Albinson appeared in a vintage ensemble from Asia, patterned in red and black. The photograph gives the corporate biography a welcome interruption. The supplier database may call for consistency; the evening wardrobe clearly has other possibilities.
His story ultimately turns on a less visible choice: noticing the work underneath an idea, and being willing to build around it. Aravo emerged from the difficulty of making a marketplace function. Years later, the founder’s responsibilities shifted again. The company continued, the career widened, and the next useful piece of work waited for attention.