It has been 10 years since Pantheon launched. At the time, it was mostly a hosting service for Drupal sites, but about six years ago, it added WordPress hosting to its lineup and raised more VC money as some of its competitors did the same. After its 2016 Series C round, things started quieting down, though the company has clear ambitions to become a public company in the next few years. To chat about those plans and the overall state of the business, I sat down with Pantheon co-founder and CEO Zack Rosen and new Pantheon board member Elissa Fink, former CMO of Tableau.
Maybe the biggest change at Pantheon is that when it launched, its team was almost solely focused on the developer experience. And while Pantheon was essentially a hosting service and offers personal plans, its focus was never on individuals who wanted a WordPress blog (which a lot of companies focused on, especially in the pre-Twitter days). Its efforts always revolved around businesses, large enterprises and the agencies that serve them.
“Back then, our overriding focus was really around the developer experience — the practitioner experience — of using our product,” Rosen explained. “And frankly, at the time, we actually really didn’t know what to call it. It really didn’t have a category, but we always felt it was something new.” He noted that over the last few years, Pantheon started talking to a lot of marketers and realized that the needs of these marketing leaders are driving this space.
“I’ve been in the website technology sector for half my life and I’ve seen it go through a lot of change,” said Rosen. “I really think it’s undergoing the biggest change, certainly amongst the leaders buying solutions, that’s the highest ever. Which is a pretty simple and fundamental switch.”
Heads of marketing, he says, currently have a very short average tenure at many companies, and those who succeed are doing so not just because they set the right strategies, but also because they’re able to implement digital experiences and programs that drive outcomes. Which is obviously where Pantheon comes in.
“All that is enabled by really new and incredibly powerful products — and those products are built fundamentally to put the marketer in the driver’s seat,” Rosen said.
But in most businesses today, the marketing team doesn’t control the website. It may be able to publish through a CMS, but for most other changes — often the ones that drive real business outcomes — marketers have to rely on an IT team. “That’s because the whole ecosystem of technology around the website, all that came of age, quite literally, in the 90s, before the rise of digital marketing,” Rosen said.
That’s very much what happened at Tableau as well, said Fink. “It was an evolution from where our website was owned by IT and a lot of it was owned by product,” she explained. “We had to wait. It took us a while to work through things like getting the ownership, but it revolutionized the speed at which we could get things done — and the quality at which we could get them done.” But to get to that point, the marketing team had to earn trust from technical teams that it could do so. “A big part of that trust of being able to take it over was the fact that we had a reliable WebOps platform, with a reliable high-quality team that we hired and a reliable platform that made us be able to do it.”
WebOps is how Pantheon is branding this overall trend. “Fundamentally, WebOps is quite literally DevOps for the web,” said Rosen. “There is this huge ginormous push around digital transformation […]. WebOps is part of this broader movement around DevOps, which is really around the fundamentals of how you actually transform and learn how to operate like a digitally native company.”
With that comes the agility to test new things and stay on top of trends, something that marketing teams are keenly aware of. “At some point as a CMO, when you’re like, ‘well, why can’t we do this new thing,’ or ‘let’s try this new thing,’ or people come and say ‘let’s be more innovative.’ Well, we can’t because we need the website to do this and the website can’t keep up with it and we can’t serve up that much personalized content or personalized experience or that many segments. And at some point, as a CMO, you need to say, ‘wait a minute, that’s just not a good reason — there’s just not a good excuse.”
That, of course, is where platforms like Pantheon come in, because they handle all of the infrastructure work of running a website. There are plenty of players in this market, but Rosen says the company’s focus sets it apart.
“This is a huge market and it’s very fractured. We’re focused on the mid-market, which I think is the most fractured,” he said. “At the consumer end of the market, there are really phenomenal businesses and products, but they’re designed for users who want to build a website in an afternoon. That’s not our customers. We work with teams that have a budget and a marketer and are running digital marketing programs.”
He acknowledged that Adobe, for example, has done really well in the enterprise market with its Experience Cloud, but in his view, these products very much focus on solving complex challenges for large enterprises and, as such, it’s very much not designed for the mid-market.
With all of this experience in building the company and what seems to be a clear focus for moving forward, Pantheon is now starting to think about becoming a public company within the next few years — but it’s not in a rush to do so.
Rosen said the company is growing quickly and currently has enough cash to control its own destiny, which allows it to position itself to define the WebOps space and build a company for the long run, which includes an IPO.
“We’re getting to a scale where you’re looking at the public market comps and the foundation pieces you need to have in place to keep up the growth rate because the numbers keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. […] But the important part to me is that we control our destiny.”