Q&A with Michael Campagnolo, Founder of Caddie Inc.

Michael Campagnolo is the founder of Caddie Inc., a technology solutions company specializing in Salesforce and Customer.io implementations and architecture. Michael worked at Goldman Sachs from 2017 to 2021 in Asset & Wealth Management in Salt Lake City.

1. How did you start your career at Goldman Sachs and what was your path at the firm? What did you learn during your time here that helped you in the next phase(s) of your career?
I began my career at GS as an Associate in Asset Management. Like the firm itself, my path was dynamic. While my core functions focused on working with brokers across the equity, fixed income, and mutual fund markets, I also participated in business intelligence, data engineering and automation projects which ultimately helped me serve as a liaison between trade operations and technology teams. I was subsequently promoted to Vice President and served as chief of staff for GSAM Trade Management. In this role, I was lucky enough to support some large-scale projects, working closely with Managing Directors and Partners on firmwide initiatives.

My time at GS was filled with invaluable lessons. I expanded my communication skills, technical aptitude, and my ability to manage stakeholders. Further, I learned the importance of building highly-energized, motivated teams, and how to tap into your team members’ best attributes. Lastly, GS taught me how to approach work. Doing a great job requires intensity and discipline, but never at the cost of being a poor teammate. These lessons unquestionably led to both personal and professional growth.

2. You recently founded Caddie in January 2023, which is a technology solutions company specializing in Salesforce and Customer.io implementations and architecture. Tell us about the path that led you here and what inspired you to build this business.
After my time at GS, I oversaw firmwide operations and revenue for a hyper-growth company. It became apparent that companies in this stage are focused on expansion, increasing their revenue funnels, and keeping up with demand. As a result, the quality of data and its architecture can get deprioritized and eventually require a massive corrective lift.

Ultimately, helping companies solve for this uplift was what inspired me to create Caddie.

It was important for me to partner with Salesforce, knowing that companies often turn to them to remove their data silos and create efficiencies. Salesforce implementations require technical knowledge, accurate scoping, and stakeholder management so companies often turn to specialists to oversee the project. Fortunately, all these skills were refined thanks to my time at GS. 

To advance our offerings, Caddie looked into the best lifecycle marketing tools with superior flexibility. We wanted to develop solutions for use cases as simple as sending an email, all the way up to programming customized web and mobile messaging, and so we partnered with Customer.io. Customer.io is at the forefront of automating the customer journey and it allows us to use our technical skills to create deep automations for clients.

While Salesforce and Customer.io are our staple partnerships, we also deliver custom software agnostic solutions for our clients.

3. What are you most proud of accomplishing since founding Caddie earlier this year?
We are most proud of our client satisfaction score, which is currently a 5/5 across our partnership platforms including Salesforce’s AppExchange. Since the day Caddie launched, we have stressed that the client experience is the heart of the company. Client experiences do not live in silo and lead to referrals, references, and revenue for the business.

Internally, we enforce client-focused Service Level Agreements, one of which is having correspondence back to the client within one hour during operating hours. Sometimes, it is as simple as confirming that we have received the client’s message, detailing the steps we will be taking, and communicating that we will be connecting with them shortly via phone call or Zoom. We firmly believe that this level of detail and client-focus has driven our positive client satisfaction score.

4. Can you tell us more about the name “Caddie” and what makes Caddie stand out from other tech-solutions businesses?
As mentioned, Caddie’s north star goals are centered around the client experience. We firmly believe that creating the best client experience drives almost all other meaningful metrics, including revenue.

By design, if the client’s company grows, then we grow. Creating a positive client experience is not just an investment in the client, but also an investment in Caddie. It was important for us to convey this when naming and branding the company, so we thought “Caddie” communicated our goal to become our clients’ trusted-advisors. We also play a lot of golf and disc golf across the team.

That said, we’re not just advisors, nor are we just operators. Caddie is the intersection of both offerings. Given our depth of technical knowledge in addition to our team members having held executive level positions before Caddie, we are able to advise on the best technical architecture for the client’s organizational objectives, and subsequently implement the solutions in-house.

Our knowledge allows for flexibility in solution design. In addition to Salesforce and Customer.io projects, we’ve also developed custom applications, improved data structures, integrated external applications, built websites and managed SEO. Our diverse skill sets and backgrounds allow us to implement full-service solutions that create meaningful impacts for our clients.

5. How have you leveraged your GS network since leaving the firm?
The GS network has been incredibly supportive since I founded Caddie. By staying in contact with other alumni, I have had an excellent sounding board for advice in growing the business. I often refer to a network as an “invisible business development team”. Relationships are so valuable, as they are constantly working behind the scenes for your organization. The alumni relationships from GS are no exception, as I have received introductions from alumni to prospective clients and leadership at adjacent organizations.

Above all, some alumni have directly become clients by referring Caddie into their new organizations. While the foundations for these relationships started at GS, they have extended professionally beyond our careers at the firm.

Lastly, it is worth noting that being a GS alumni helps win client trust. Prospective clients understand that GS is highly selective and that its employees are trustworthy and agile problem-solvers.

6. What are your aspirations for Caddie’s future?
Caddie gets very interesting in 2024. While our clients range across the financial, tech, energy, media, healthcare and real estate sectors, we have also discovered that many of our clients are looking for similar tools and applications to create efficiencies. With that in mind, we began development on our first software application in Q3 2023 on Salesforce’s rails and will bring it to market in 2024. The product will focus on quantifying a customer’s value throughout the relationship’s lifecycle and surfacing it across various business functions.

On the consulting side, we anticipate that our expertise in Salesforce and Customer.io will continue to be in demand. Specifically, we specialize in creating customized data pipelines between these platforms and we believe that client requirements here will continue to grow, as RevOps metrics continue to expand into organizations' decision-making processes.

Lastly, we are writing our first pre-seed funding check to an AI start-up based in New York. It is important to us to help other founders on their journeys while continuing to diversify Caddie’s capital allocation. We expect to continue to participate in venture rounds for early, high growth companies.