Zorik Gordon likes the part of a business when the parts are still on the floor. In 2005, with a young advertising company to build, he reached for a mechanical comparison: “I like building the car more than watching it drive.” It was an unusually clear statement of preference. Plenty of founders enjoy the ribbon-cutting photograph. Gordon was describing his appetite for the questions that come before it, when an idea has to survive contact with people who have other things to do.
That preference helps connect an otherwise curious collection of ventures. Online games, local advertising, home repairs and professional credentials do not look like a natural family. Follow the work being asked of the customer, though, and a relationship appears. There is a task to complete, a system that makes it awkward, and an opportunity for a company willing to handle more of the awkwardness. This is one way to read Gordon’s career: a succession of attempts to make complicated transactions fit into ordinary days.
A builder before the bell
Before ReachLocal, Gordon co-founded Jackpot.com. He then served as WorldWinner’s chief executive and vice president of corporate development from 1999 to 2003. WorldWinner offered prize-based competitions in online games. Its users came to play; the company had to arrange the technology and commercial machinery around them. Gordon’s early business life already involved a familiar internet question: how do you bring people to a service, and how do you make that service worth returning to?
By December 2002, WorldWinner had secured a $9.2 million financing round led by Benchmark Capital. Gordon wanted more players to arrive directly at its website rather than principally through distribution partners such as Lycos. The distinction mattered. A partner could introduce customers, but a company also needed its own relationship with them. He was thinking about the route to the customer as carefully as the experience on the screen.
The ambitions were substantial, but the building preference was personal. In his 2005 account, he described enjoying the problems and uncertainty of a business before its model settled. The car comparison is useful because it contains no promise of a smooth ride. Assembly involves discovering which parts fail to fit. His later companies would give that preference plenty of exercise.
The customer had other plans
ReachLocal addressed a migration that was already underway. People were looking online for businesses that still bought much of their advertising offline. Gordon saw room for a service that helped those businesses follow their customers. A merchant accustomed to arranging a directory advertisement now faced a collection of digital channels, each demanding decisions, spending and attention. The internet had made the customer easier to reach in theory. In practice, it had introduced a considerable amount of homework.
In a 2011 interview, Gordon described the owners he wanted to serve as people running companies with roughly five to 50 employees. Their working day was occupied by the business itself. Learning the latest advertising tools was an additional responsibility, one with no obvious place in the calendar. ReachLocal’s proposition was to help them buy and manage digital advertising while they carried on with their work.
The original plan relied on self-service and distribution through partners. Customers did not behave as expected. ReachLocal developed its own field sales organization and became a fuller service business. Gordon had kept the opportunity and changed the method. His advice from that period emphasized being able to work through disorder. A customer’s reluctance could be useful evidence, provided the company was willing to act on it.
“You have to be comfortable with a little chaos.”
Zorik Gordon, 2011
There is a practical lesson here for anyone selling software to busy people. Ease of use begins before a customer signs in. It includes deciding what to buy, understanding the bill and knowing whom to call. The sales organization became part of how ReachLocal delivered that reassurance. Gordon’s adjustment recognized that a product could be technically accessible while still being a burden to adopt.
When local became international
The numbers soon gave the venture a different scale. ReachLocal reported revenue of $4.4 million in 2005 and $146.8 million in 2008. By the summer of 2009 it had more than 700 employees worldwide and ranked No. 39 on the Inc. 500 list. Gordon acknowledged the role of timing and luck, and described the unfamiliar demands of running an organization that size. The building work had acquired departments, offices and a payroll.
In May 2010, ReachLocal went public. Gordon later estimated that the preparations included 36 hours of meetings across ten days. The familiar image of an initial public offering is a bell and a smiling management team. The calendar supplies the less decorative version. A company brings new investors into the room and takes on new obligations; the operating work continues after the ceremony.
Growth also remained vulnerable to customers’ circumstances. In the second quarter of 2011, revenue rose 32 percent to $92.8 million, yet fell below analysts’ expectations. Gordon described small businesses becoming cautious about advertising spending. International operations, meanwhile, grew 86 percent from the previous year’s quarter. The figures capture two realities at once: expansion abroad and sensitivity to the budgets of individual merchants.
Japan made the meaning of “local” particularly concrete. ReachLocal established its Japanese office in 2011 and began full operations in June 2012. Hiroyasu Hozumi led the business there. The team adapted operating practices and rewrote customer materials instead of merely translating English documents. Selling the same service in another country required people who understood how to explain it there.
This is the pleasantly inconvenient thing about local commerce. Scale does not erase place. A business can share technology across markets, but trust still develops through particular conversations. The Japanese operation made that work visible: a local office, local staff, and changes to the way the offer was presented. Gordon’s international company remained dependent on the details of individual customers’ lives.
Breakfast, with a repair on the side
Advertising raised another question. Once someone had found a service provider, why should arranging the actual job remain difficult? Gordon’s 2012 Forbes essay argued that local online commerce would move further into transactions. Search could introduce two parties. Booking required them to agree on what would happen next. The opportunity had moved from helping a business appear on a screen to helping a customer finish a purchase.
With ClubLocal, Gordon described an admirably ordinary ambition: arranging a repair while eating Cheerios. The service offered advance screening of providers, set prices and an online route through booking and payment. Breakfast was a useful test because it put a boundary around the task. A person wanted the household problem handled without having the entire morning claimed by the arrangements.
Gordon resigned as ReachLocal’s chief executive and director in September 2013. He and fellow founder Michael Kline continued developing the service-booking idea. In 2014, they relaunched ClubLocal as SERVIZ. Customers could see prices and book appointments across hundreds of home-service categories. The company worked with local technicians and handled the marketing and booking. It was taking on more of the transaction than an advertising platform would.
Gordon summarized the promise that October: “You press a button, and we’re responsible for the entire transaction.” The sentence is short; the responsibility is extensive. Behind any such button sit schedules, people, prices and the possibility that something will go wrong. For a customer, the appeal is having someone else organize those moving parts. For the company, those parts become the business.
Three different products, connected here by the work they organize.
The company after the founder
SERVIZ had competitors pursuing similar convenience. Capital, reach and reliable execution all mattered. In November 2016, ENGIE announced that it had led a $9.7 million funding round. At that point SERVIZ served seven American markets, including Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle and Chicago. Gordon described repeat customer use and plans to broaden services and geography. The idea had moved well beyond a breakfast-sized demonstration.
Porch acquired SERVIZ in August 2018. The acquisition brought technology and home-service expertise into a larger platform. Gordon and Kline did not remain with the company afterward. For the founders, this was a departure as well as a transaction. A business can continue under its name while the people who began it move on to another set of problems.
ReachLocal had also continued beyond Gordon’s tenure. Gannett acquired it in 2016, three years after he left. Keeping that sequence clear makes the career more interesting. Founding a company, leading it through an IPO and overseeing its eventual acquisition are distinct chapters. Gordon’s part in the first two should not swallow the work done by the people who came afterward.
His connections reached into other consumer businesses too. In December 2014, Gordon participated in a Bungalow Clothing funding round and joined its board. The company was led by former ReachLocal co-founder Rob Wright and offered personal styling with clothes sent to customers to try at home. Here again was a business organizing something familiar around a different delivery process, supported by a relationship carried forward from an earlier venture.
A different kind of unfinished work
Certemy brought Gordon into professional credential management. Founded in 2017, the company provides workflow software for employers, licensing boards and certification organizations. It tracks and manages licenses, certifications and related records. The setting is quieter than an advertising market or a home-service app, but the work has plenty of moving parts: applications, documents, renewals and verification.
A credential has a life after it is issued. Someone has to know its status and act when a requirement changes or a deadline approaches. Multiply that work across an organization and a collection of individual tasks becomes an operating system of its own. Certemy’s product addresses that administrative load. For Gordon, it offers another setting in which a company can absorb complexity that its customers would otherwise handle themselves.
In October 2020, Certemy announced SOC 2 Type 2 certification and identified Gordon as founder and CEO. The announcement concerned the controls used to safeguard customer data. It was a fitting milestone for a business managing records: the company asking customers to trust its system also had to demonstrate how it looked after the information inside it.
A reported $9.7 million equity round followed in December 2022. A published account of the financing identifies Numeta Capital and Apis Holdings as lead investors and lists Gordon alongside Sergey Sundukovskiy, Oleg Shvarts and Shawn Cantor as founders. The account describes plans to invest in product development, sales and marketing and expand in the enterprise market. Ambition, in this chapter, involved selling a system for work that happens largely out of sight.
The car Gordon described in 2005 has taken several forms. The recurring attraction seems to lie in the assembly: choosing a problem, testing the approach and finding people who can help make the machinery run. His career rewards attention to the less photogenic moments, when customers hesitate or a process needs another revision. There is always another part on the floor. For someone who enjoys building, that is a reason to stay interested.
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