Scaling Swagbucks (A)

In early 2014, Chuck Davis (HBS '86) has joined Swagbucks as its first professional CEO to scale a successful and profitable brand promotion and consumer research business. Davis came into the job while serving as a venture partner at TCV, a growth stage VC firm, concurrent with TCV’s $60 million investment in the company. As a hired-gun CEO, Davis had grown and sold Shopzilla (formerly Bizate) to Scripps and then, again as CEO, Fandango to Comcast, so he had a well-honed playbook for scaling tech companies. But Swagbucks was different. Its founder Josef Gorowitz had grown Swagbucks by sourcing talent from family and friends – literally. The result was an organization built around a culture based in the deeply-held religious beliefs of the founding employees, nearly all of whom were ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews. This presented challenges, starting with the requirement that the company shutter operations every week in observance of the Sabbath and throughout the year for major and minor Jewish holidays. Davis was on board to scale the business, but he wrestled with how exactly to mainstream its culture without breaking the thing that had made Swagbucks successful.