All-American seeks to score a touchdown in PH

Jeremy Bloom

Almost like some sort of ritual, kids meet in a backyard in a quiet neighborhood in a little subdivision in Pampanga. The lot is not big. It’s not the kind of venue for championships, not the kind with a large basketball court and bleachers on both sides, but at least it’s free in the afternoon.

The sun makes the floor too hot that they have to keep moving so as not to burn their feet from standing too long. Passersby would hear slippers shuffling against hot cement, the sound of a ball dribbling against a ticking clock, then the swish as it hits a hoop.

“Three points!” A kid shouts. In their heads, they hear the crowd losing their mind, they are in Araneta Coliseum, and suddenly their team has just won the game.

A lot of Filipino kids dream like that. They watch national basketball games on TV, scheming plans in their heads as to how they would ever play as good as these icons. Most people never ask what happens after reaching that dream, because there are only a few who ever did.

This article is not exactly about Philippine basketball though. It’s about the dream that most kids who love sports have at an age when the world was at the tip of their fingers. More importantly, it’s about the few who actually get to reach that dream, and the story that unfolds after that.

It’s about Jeremy Bloom, two-time Olympian for skiing, All-American football player, and now entrepreneur who was in the Philippines recently without much fanfare. He is not that known here, a country which worships basketball games like a religion and closes shop to watch important boxing matches as if they were national holidays.

In many ways, Bloom started out as a dreamer like most of us. At 10 years old, he said he dreamed of free-skiing in the Olympics and being a National Football League player.

He would achieve all that and more nine years later. But moreover, this story is about how, at 19 years old, just when he’s done much more than most kids his age, he started wondering about what happens next after realizing his childhood dream.

After putting his career as a professional athlete behind in his late 20s, he is now CEO of a marketing software company called Integrate, which is currently servicing global companies like Apple Inc. In a nutshell, his company helps other firms, through software, discern which advertisements lead to new customers and which don’t.

“I can’t say that I dreamed of starting a company and watching it grow now into a big business,” Bloom told the Inquirer, talking about his company which has close to $50 million in capital. “That dream for me happened later in life.”

He wants to help other entrepreneurs achieve their own dreams.

On Oct. 20, Bloom was part of a group of investors who went here in the Philippines in search of start-ups they could invest in.

He was here in search of “exceptional entrepreneurs who have a vision.” It does not have to be related to marketing software, his main line of business, he said. It could be at any point in the business, even if it’s just in its early stages.

He was in the Philippine International Convention Center (PICC), in time for the Slingshot Asean 2017. It was a start-up event that allowed budding players to showcase their business models to a wider audience, including local and international investors like Bloom.

Bloom came at a time when the industry estimates there are only around 200 active start-ups in the country. Moreover, a recent survey by PwC Philippines showed that half of these companies believed that they had to go outside the country in order to grow, a finding which suggested the country might not be ready for these so-called innovative products and services.

Nevertheless, the ecosystem is striving, and the government is even mulling over incentives that could help improve this high-risk environment.

“I think this is an up-and-coming place for entrepreneur activity and I’m really excited about it. I’m excited to support that and be a part of helping younger entrepreneurs build big and disruptive companies,” he said.

Bloom’s own journey toward entrepreneurship started in the latter part of his sports career, when he enrolled in the Wharton Business School. Like a lot of people who wanted to start a business, building your own company meant leaving the nine to five job you’ve been working in for years.

Bloom retired from his childhood dreams in his late 20s, then had a regular job after.

“So my first job when I retired from athletics, I was running customer acquisition marketing. I found myself in marketing kind of by accident,” he said.

He worked there for around nine months. That was when the idea for Integrate popped up, after he realized that software could solve the most difficult part of doing the job. He then left to build his own company in 2010.

“I remember my first [attempt] to raise capital. They just knew me as a football, skier guy. So that actually made it more difficult because investors wanted to back entrepreneurs that have been successful before,” he said.

He said the biggest challenge for any entrepreneur was managing one’s own thoughts, especially in the face of increasing, and yet sudden pressure.

“What happens to every entrepreneur is you wake up, you have breakfast, and you feel good about your business. You think you’re going to take over the world then right around lunch time, you would get a phone call and you could lose a big customer, or you could lose a really important employee. All of a sudden, you’re going to think, gosh, I don’t think I’m going to be able to make the payroll next week,” he said.

In 2010, he said he met Seth Levine, partner and co-founder of Foundry Group, a venture capital firm focused on early stage investments in technologies businesses.

This helped Bloom bring the company up, although he admitted that it took three years before the company found its footing.

“It took us about three years to figure out who we were going to be. 2013 was a great year. We tripled revenue, we tripled revenue again in 2014-2015, then we doubled the next year. That was really when the idea really started taking off and we knew we were building a market of opportunities,” he said.

Looking back, he said life was a series of reinventions, a phrase that a lot of interested entrepreneurs could relate to.

“My goal in leaving athletics is I wanted to reinvent myself. I didn’t want to be a coach. I didn’t want to be on TV for athletics. I wanted to do something really different,” he said.

And now he wants to help others do the same thing, too.