Rokt
Bruce Buchanan spent 10 years as Group CEO of Jetstar, an Australian low-cost airline that he grew into the most successful carrier in the Asia Pacific region. He expanded the team from scratch to 7,000+ employees and built revenue to over $3 billion. During this time, he noticed a critical gap: while Jetstar excelled at creating personalized purchase journeys for customers, most e-commerce companies were leaving money on the table by offering generic checkout experiences.
In 2012, Bruce founded Rokt with the core insight that "taking a customer on a purchase journey with a personally relevant checkout experience presented a significant opportunity being underserved by the technology community." The company built a platform that uses real-time data and decisioning to deliver "the next best action for each person in each Transaction Moment™."
Rokt has grown to serve major e-commerce partners, enabling them to achieve up to 2x profitability while building customer loyalty and engagement. Bruce continues to expand the offering and scale the business to similar levels of success as Jetstar achieved in the airline industry.
- •Bruce leveraged deep operational experience from scaling a major business (Jetstar to $3B+) to identify a real market gap that others were overlooking in e-commerce.
- •The founding insight came from direct observation of customer behavior problems in a different industry, allowing him to recognize the same pattern in e-commerce before competitors.
- •By focusing on a specific transaction moment (checkout) rather than trying to optimize entire customer journeys, Rokt created a differentiated, defensible product.
- •Bruce's credibility from building one of Asia's most successful airlines likely made it easier to attract enterprise e-commerce customers who valued his operational track record.
- 1.Identify inefficiencies in customer-facing processes in an industry you know deeply, then explore whether that same problem exists in adjacent markets with higher growth potential.
- 2.Focus on a specific, high-value moment in the customer journey (like checkout) where personalization can directly impact revenue, rather than trying to build a general platform.
- 3.Leverage your operational credibility from previous ventures to establish trust with enterprise customers—your track record of scaling becomes part of your sales narrative.
- 4.Build around real-time decisioning and data rather than static rules, allowing your product to improve continuously as you learn more about customer behavior.
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