Rick Nucci

Rick Nucci is co-founder and CEO of Guru, a knowledge platform for company teams. He started Guru in 2013 after founding Boomi, which Dell acquired in 2010.

Burning the Ships at Boomi

Boomi started in March 2000, he told Boomi, in a market crowded with integration vendors. At JavaOne in 2006 a talk about databases small enough to run on memory sticks set him thinking that if SaaS took off, integration would have to work differently. He drew the idea up in his hotel room and brought it to Mitchell Stewart, then running Boomi engineering. "We're burning the ships," he recalled deciding. "We're rebuilding and replatforming the entire architecture to do this."

Three Years at Dell Before Guru

He stayed at Dell for three years and left in 2013 to start Guru with Stewart, he told Intercom. Guru, he said, "was born out of a pain I personally lived at my last startup": getting the right knowledge to the right person at the right time. Its first fit was growing sales teams for high-tech products, "essentially the Boomi sales team."