#20 DigiCert

   Ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby. And no one can verify that better than DigiCert. In a decade of business, the provider of digital SSL certificates has offered real online security, real corporate culture, real customer service and real go-for-broke swings. “We’re a David-and-Goliath story,” says Ryan Woodley, CFO of the $36-million company. “We’ve gone up against the big guns like VeriSign, which is now under Symantec, and we’ve grown to be the third-largest — and fastest-growing — issuer of high assurance digital certifications. Up until now we’ve been under the radar, but we’re ready to let people know who we are.” In that case, may we introduce … the real deal.  

DigiCert is your stereotypical entrepreneur story of the guy who started a business in the basement, took the lumps every entrepreneur takes and turned it into a success. The founder, Ken Bretschneider, was a designer by profession. He was a talented artist who wanted to build a website and needed a digital certificate of authenticity in order to sell his work securely. When he went to buy one, it was a tremendously painful experience. He thought — as all good entrepreneurs do — there had to be a better way. 

There was an existing market with entrenched competition, but Ken was determined. He did everything 24/7 — customer service, marketing, sales, finance. He would literally be answering support calls and customers would say, “Are you at home? Are those your kids in the background?” Then he’d pause and they’d hang up. But he got through it. And eventually, the revenue doubled … then tripled … then quadrupled. 

DigiCert was born out of the most simple concept. Treat employees right, they’ll take care of your customers and your customers will come back. When we tell that to people, they find it hard to believe. They say, “Yeah, that’s the fluffy stuff. What do you really do?” The secret is that what we do hides in plain sight. 

We smirk when people talk about culture. People interpret it in many different ways, but to us culture is people working the hours they do for reasons beyond what you pay them. At DigiCert you’ll find people take pride in what we do and the honesty and transparency we do it with. We secure traffic on the Internet. That’s a noble pursuit. 

We do things to help augment the culture — things that other companies think constitute a culture. To make sure we attract and retain the right people, we do things like the DigiTrip. Every year, everyone in the company gets a company-paid trip to anywhere in the world. It’s a free week of vacation not included in PTO. We also take the entire company — and their families — to Disneyland every year. We do at least one company party a season. We have taco trucks come to the office. We have date night. But again, that’s not culture. It’s simply our way of telling employees we think they’re awesome.

It’s impossible for us to hire people fast enough. We should probably be hiring twice as fast, but we are thorough and thoughtful about whom we hire. We don’t want any sour apples.

Space has been a huge issue. We’ve bounced around a couple of Canopy buildings in Lindon. We’ve got 13,000 square feet here, and we’ll double that in our new space in Lehi. Right now, there are three desks where one person used to be. Our ping-pong room has to be used as a conference room! Those are high-class problems right there. 

Service sets us apart. Many companies think service is an employee being friendly. That’s important, but when we say service, we mean we help the customer do everything they need to do as fast as is humanly possible. The No. 1 question we ask ourselves is what can we do to make our customers’ lives easier? If they need it, we will build a tool for it. 

Our customer service reviews are the metric we take the most pride in. We were devastated when we got our first four-star review. The guy said he had an awesome experience, but he was philosophically opposed to giving anyone a five out of five. It was a heartbreaking moment for the company. We had to look in the mirror and say, “We’re going to be all right.” (laughs) But the amazing thing is if you go on the Internet, you cannot find a single negative review of DigiCert. For a 10-year-old company that has served 72,000 customers in 142 countries, that’s pretty cool.

We’ve liked being under the radar. We’ve liked DigiCert being our little secret. But this next stage where people will know our name? We’re ready.