Astound Commerce’s new CEO Michael Kahn on expansion in Ukraine, globally
After more than a year of quarantines and sitting at home, we’re all excited about the lockdowns easing up. But this is especially true of Michael Kahn, Global CEO of Astound Commerce since September last year.
On a trip to visit the company’s Ukraine-based centres, MK (as his colleagues call him) bounds around the corridors, chatting up team members excited to see the company leader.
“I basically haven’t met anyone, except for online, since I became the chief executive last year,” MK admits during an interview in Astound’s Kyiv engineering centre.
But it’s not just enthusiasm about the meetings that has the CEO fired up. With 40 years of experience in creative digital agencies, marketing and digital commerce, MK is taking the helm at Astound at a pivotal moment for the company.
Astound came into the pandemic strong and well-prepared to take advantage of booming demand for digital commerce solutions. It counts a collection of A-list clients, which include such global brands as Puma, L’Oréal, Under Armour, FLOR, TOMS, and Crocs.
While we’re unlikely to see the COVID-driven boom persist at quite the same pace, digital commerce is now at a “new baseline” according to the CEO.
That’s also good news to Ukraine, currently home to an impressive five Astound engineering centers. With maintaining and growing talent as his main priority, Astound’s CEO is aiming to build on the company’s presence across the country.
Left-brained solutions architects for digital commerce
According to MK, Astound’s business boils down to four key elements or service lines: mapping users’ digital commerce journey, designing a best-in-class experience, generating demand, and leveraging the technology that underpins the whole system.
“We are a left-brain leaning company,” MK says, explaining that this contrasts Astound to much of the classical advertising and marketing sector, which tends to focus on creativity or right-brain aspects.
What that means is a greater focus on data and technical solutions, which is particularly handy for clients at a time of explosive growth and complexity across the whole digital commerce sector.
The features and solutions of ecommerce platforms that we use with customers in the B2B, B2C, and B2B2C space are constantly evolving, which can easily overwhelm company managers.
That’s where Astound comes in, MK explains. As leading experts in the field – with more than 3,000 projects delivered over a period of 20 years – they have a detailed knowledge of the technologies and cloud platforms involved and can design tailored, integrative solutions.
“We’re solution architects” MK sums it up.
A new post-Covid baseline
This understanding of digital commerce solutions has been at a premium since the pandemic hit. All of a sudden, businesses with scores of salespeople used to wining and dining clients found themselves stuck. They could not travel and win new deals the way they had for years.
When Covid first hit this resulted in a shock. Just like the rest of the business world, many of Astound’s clients (and soon-to-be clients) were trying to figure out what to do next, MK explains. But then they realized the opportunity offered by digital sales – and jumped in with both feet.
Things turned around almost overnight, MK affirms, creating a huge spike in demand. All of sudden the company had to accelerate its growth exponentially. “In just three months of 2020 ecommerce adoption reached the level that it would have taken another 10 years to achieve,” MK exclaims enthusiastically.
“It’s like someone lit a rocketship,” he sums it up.
That doesn’t mean the boom will go on forever. “Physical will come back. It is already coming back,” MK explains. “But the question is what the new baseline will be.”
The Astound CEO likens it to Amazons’ sales growth. Each year in December the company reaches a new high as people are making a bigger share of their holiday shopping online. In January, the sales numbers drop back down – but the benchmark, or baseline, is higher than it was a year ago.
MK predicts it will be the same when it comes to digital commerce – even despite the rise of all-in-one solutions. “There are companies at different stages,” he notes. “The sector is marked by a great dynamism and is hugely fertile.”
“The ability to deliver solutions has become foundational,” he adds.
In a digital age, putting people first
While Astound may be “left-brained” MK’s priority as Global CEO, perhaps counterintuitively, is very much focused on people. “My number one job is talent,” he clearly states.
That means both maintaining the current pool of talent available to Astound, as well as growing and securing the talent of the future.
The first is trickier than it seems. Booming business and working from home have put a strain on staff, often in hidden ways.
Even if they love their job, a lot of people are feeling tired.
MK aims to address this through a series of measures, including by ensuring people have the right rewards and compensation, incentivizing learning and development, and creating the right corporate culture.
That’s no easy feat in an age where work means endless zoom calls. But MK believes that with the right culture and approach remote work can be even more effective – and engaging – than the offline version we’ve all grown accustomed to.
“We found that online conversations can be more engaging, people contribute more in the chat – the question is how to ensure this offline,” he notes with some irony.
Getting new talent coming through the door is the other side of the equation. Companies from all over the world are ramping up their hiring efforts. Anyone with decent engineering or development skills is all of a sudden on a seller’s market, something that MK does not expect will change anytime soon.
“In a tech-driven world, this will be the case for the next 5 years,” he emphasizes.
Part of Astound’s solution to this issue is a global outreach to areas with pockets of exciting talents, and specifically to university centres with the potential to educate the kind of experts the company needs. Historically, this has taken the form of training programs known as Bootcamps – ways to engage and identify the right talent early.
But the future might require greater collaboration with the universities themselves, MK explains. This means creating programs that target students directly, and even greater collaboration with university administrators themselves.
“We will be building into universities,” he notes.
Employer branding is also important, the Astound CEO adds. A big part of his mission is building and conveying that brand – making sure the company has the right messaging and is able to effectively communicate the culture and values that make it such an appealing place to work.
Ukraine as a key part of the Astound future
Ukraine plays an important role for Astound – both in terms of the company’s past and of its future. Indeed, the digital commerce player has historical ties with the country. Astound Commerce itself was initially launched by a group of entrepreneurs of Ukrainian origin – Igor Gorin, Ilya Vinogradsky, and Roman Martynenko.
The three founders emigrated from the Soviet Union in the late-1980s and early-1990s and met each other within 12 months of arriving to San Francisco in their high school years. Their entrepreneurial drive brought them together on various projects that eventually culminated in the creation of Astound Commerce.
Years later the story came full-circle. Astound was expanding into Ukraine, leveraging the country’s booming supplies of digital and engineering talent.
Astound currently has 5 separate engineering centres in Ukraine – in Kyiv, Chernihiv, Lutsk, Uzhhorod and Vinnytsia. During his weeklong visit, MK toured four of the offices, praising the energy and passion of the team, that currently numbers close to 900 IT professionals.
Looking forward, MK is optimistic about growth in Ukraine – both for Astound itself and the sector overall. While there has been some concern over the past years about the boom fizzing out, the flip side is that the growing density of talent of expertise means that the level of professionalism of the market is continuously getting better.
MK noted that he was “optimistic about the talent base in Ukraine,” adding that to fully take advantage of it, there would need to be more effort to build out the infrastructure to harness it all across the country.
Investments fuel capabilities
The past years have also been busy for Astound in terms of investments – both in the company and by it. In 2019 the company received an investment from Salesforce Ventures fund, the investment arm of the customer relationship management giant.
Less than two years later, in May 2021, private equity firm RLH – experienced in business services, healthcare and government services – announced its investment after months of in-depth conversations. The RLH managing directors, Rob Rodin and Ryan Smiley, highlighted that Astound was an “exceptional enterprise that is well-positioned to capitalize on the fundamental shift in consumer purchasing habits from brick & mortar to online.”
The goal of this latest investment is the fulfilment of Astound’s North Star plan, MK discloses. This initiative, launched in the beginning of 2020, has the target of making Astound the global market leader in digital commerce.
As part of that plan Astound has already begun to expand its breadth of capabilities, notably through the acquisition of Marketforce, a business unit within Digital River focused on digital performance marketing services .
As Astound Global CEO explains this investment will strengthen the business generation component – one of the four main areas of Astound’s activities. As a result, the company will not only be able to build the right solutions for its clients, but also propel their digital marketing efforts.
“Combining Astound’s experience, technology, design and demand capabilities with MarketForce’s proven performance marketing business model and outstanding global services will enable us to move forward together as the most powerful end-to-end digital commerce specialist in the marketplace today,” says Igor Gorin, the founder-turned-North American CEO.
The company certainly has ambitious plans. “We want to grow 3 to 5-fold by 2025,” MK boldly states. The way to get there is by doubling down on the recipe that has worked so well in the past – creating state-of-the-art technical capabilities, focusing on solving client’s problems by designing the right solution architecture and ensuring it has the best people to deliver.
