Get to know Hubbl Technologies CEO Rob Acker

What was the path you took to get to where you are today?

For over 30 years I have been helping businesses transition to the cloud and accelerate their growth. Previously, I was at Salesforce, where I was the CEO of Salesforce.org, and led the business to become the most impactful nonprofit social enterprise in the world. 

Getting to that point though, was an important one. I started at Salesforce before we had even launched the product and was the first sales leader hired to help shape the way we spoke to customers about how to market a concept and a piece of technology that didn’t yet exist in the market. 

Looking back on it now, I think this is where my passion for speaking with customers and understanding their pain points began. In those early developmental years, I was in the trenches every day not only with our customers, but also our teams to gather input around the product, and then architect that feedback into the product to ensure mutual success—for the customer and our business. 

By building a product with our community—and not at our community—we were able to not only develop a killer product that ended up reinventing the cloud landscape, but also forged a community within our customer base. It was a completely different mindset, and it changed the way that I thought about customer success in relation to how it drives business, not the other way around.

How did this new mindset shape the way you hoped to make an impact in the tech space moving forward?

Mutually assured success has always been a critical mindset for me—meaning that both the customer and the company where I worked next were thriving together. 

I also knew that a sense of belonging—really doing work that matters to something bigger than just my own benefit—was important. I think this goes hand in hand with being a part of disruption in the market. Disruption not only requires a team of other visionaries around you to provide a deeper purpose of not only doing great work, but together, having the desire and passion to launch a movement.

Lastly, building a customer community will always be, at the core, the purpose of how I run a business. It’s a critical, yet often overlooked, part of creating mutually assured success throughout every stage of any business. It’s also easy to lose sight of your customer community as your company scales, but if you put the customer first and maintain your company ethos, success will follow.

One key member of my community that I stuck close to was Greg Malpass. From the early days of watching his tiny Salesforce consultancy, through to its growth into a platinum consulting partner & product company, our values were always aligned. Little did I know our paths would soon cross again as Greg’s newest product company grabbed my attention.

Why did you choose Hubbl as your next venture?

When I first learned about Hubbl, I knew I was looking at something truly revolutionary, but I have to admit, it took a moment to grasp. The co-founders Mike and Chris had completely reimagined the way businesses could achieve customer success. They understood the complexity in the challenges customers were facing on a completely different plane that I was familiar with.

One thing that stood out to me was the depth of the insights they were able to produce and analyze. It felt like I was speaking to scientists who could access another dimension into the future. And while we were both aiming to address the same problems for customers, their ability to get to the root of the problem through AI and Machine Learning unlocked an entirely new mindset for me. It’s where we together built this vision for solving the last mile in the cloud, by democratizing customer success.

I knew instantly that it was something I wanted to be a part of, and that I could help them showcase the platform in a way that not only resonated with customers, but also help them visualize what the future of their company could look like.

How does Hubbl’s mission align to your vision to democratize customer success?

I’ve spoken to tens of thousands of companies over the course of my career, and it always comes back to the same concerns: adoption, security risks, technical debt, data quality, rising costs, and complexity. These issues are completely valid—they stifle speed to innovation, and in turn, how companies provide the best experiences for their own customers.

This, of course, has me fired up by our mission, our technology, and our opportunities in the future.

We’re not just helping companies untangle the current complex web of building on the cloud. 

Instead, we’re heightening the power of how communities and new technologies can empower businesses. Hubbl does this by offering a comprehensive platform, powered by a sophisticated recommendation engine, to utilize the collective intelligence of other businesses like theirs. It allows them to identify, diagnose, and guide teams—regardless of their role, goals, or existing systems—to accelerate innovation by helping them easily understand their business growth and optimization opportunities. It’s the fastest, safest, and most secure way to begin the process of optimizing your organization—not only to get it to peak health, but also to identify how to reach its full potential.

What is your vision for Hubbl’s future?

Hubbl’s recent partnership with Swantide is a testament to the unique opportunities ahead of us, particularly within the Salesforce ecosystem. This partnership means that, for the first time, Salesforce teams and System Integrators can have an end-to-end experience that both identifies optimization recommendations and automates their implementation. We help them quickly and efficiently access key insights, enhance business productivity, reduce shelf-ware, and inspire what’s next for their business, resulting in an elevated overall Salesforce experience.

We also recognize that innovation accelerates when we tap into the collective wisdom of the community. That’s why partnerships like ours with Swantide are so critical. This partnership allows us to drive a community-driven movement that democratizes success, enabling organizations to optimize for growth in order to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving ecosystem.

There is an imperative need to find better ways to drive customer success. To me, a profitable business is the result of putting customer success above all else. As tech becomes increasingly complex, it’s critical that we find ways that not only allow customers to access the amazing new capabilities offered, but also to make sure that it helps them solve problems, and actually works to their benefit long-term. Without customer success, adoption will fail—making all the efforts put into developing new technologies void.

Similar to what Salesforce experienced in the start—and as with most revolutionary technology or concepts—I understand that customers might have a hard time grasping Hubbl’s full power. At first glance, Hubbl has been seen as a tool to unlock insights about your business. But really, it’s a platform to unleash success at scale. Listening in on customer calls was the deal-closer for me. Hearing the impact Hubbl was delivering by solving that last mile of cloud computing was incredible. I could see how important Hubbl was to the customer based on their responses, and as soon as customers realized its full-power, they were hooked.