Starting up with Taylor Smith

On Tuesdays, we get into the weeds with the founders of HR tech startups. Want to tell us about your company? Get in touch here.

Taylor Smith is the co-founder and CEO of Blueboard, an employee-recognition service that partners with organizations to offer experiential, customized rewards to employees. Smith started the company in San Francisco in 2014, when he was hustling secondhand Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber concert tickets to make ends meet, he told HR Brew. Now, it has amassed nearly $16 million in funding from a variety of investors, including Greycroft and Bullpen Capital. Smith told HR Brew how tailoring bespoke experiences to workplace rewards can be a boon for engagement and retention.

What product or service does your company offer? We are an experiential rewards and recognition platform. [The majority] of companies have recognition programs, but the rewards are usually stuff. It’s like gift cards, it’s merchandise, it’s electronics. It’s all nice, it’s not awful, but our generation tends to spend our own money on experiences, right? We’re saving to go to concerts, eat out, and travel to other countries. So, we thought, “How cool would it be if a company could hit a button, and the employee could just choose how they want to spend quality time out in the world?” Whether that’s getting a couple’s massage [or] taking a surfing lesson…and the company pays for all of it. So, that’s what we do—we send people on adventures all over the world.

How does the service work? You would get a reward in your email, you’d click “activate,” you go to our experience menu, and you key-in your location, and then the menu is going to show all of the experiences that are within that budget within [about] a 50-mile range of where you’re located.

What specific issue in HR does your company intend to solve? For our clients, it’s mostly around retention and engagement. Most recognition programs are designed when someone has done a good job to come in and to say, “Hey, thanks so much, you did an awesome job.” The problem with most recognition programs is when you give someone a gift card, they forget about it like a week later. You’re not thinking to yourself, “I did a great job releasing that product because I got a gift card.” The thing with experiences is, let’s say you jump out of a plane. You remember that skydiving experience. And you’re going to remember it because you did a badass job on that product release. So, it’s all about, trying to tie a memory to some awesome work that somebody did. That’s all about retention and making sure that employees love the companies that they work at.

How does your company solve that specific issue? As a company, you can make an impact on people or you can totally mess them up. There’s key moments: What is someone’s experience on their first day of work? What does it feel like when they get promoted? What happens at the end of year? That can largely make or break the employee experience. And our thesis is that when companies either miss those moments, or give a half-hearted reward to someone, they miss the opportunity to actually build that engagement and build that pride for some of the work. The company, whether they do something like give a Blueboard award and say, “Hey, take your [partner] to a couple’s massage,” or “Go to a Michelin star meal to commemorate that moment,” that actually builds the affinity for the company. So, it’s all about making an impression in those moments that matter.

What kind of companies are your primary customers? Mostly tech companies, and then life sciences companies or biopharma companies…There are also companies like Shake Shack [and] Chick-fil-A.

How do you think the HR tech field will evolve over the next 5 to 10 years? HR 1.0 was all about, how do you bring compliance and employee records online? HR 2.0 is all about engagement. How do you [make sure you] have wellness programs for people? How do you finance health programs for people? I think that’s really interesting. This whole notion before Covid, that you had your personal self and you had your work self and it was very easy to keep them separated, that was socially acceptable. Now, when people are on Zoom, over the last few years, you see someone’s cat behind them, or just kids running around. That barrier between [the] work self and the personal has completely eroded. So, we’re seeing that the most successful and innovative companies are thinking beyond, “How do I support Sam, the worker? and they’re thinking, “How do I support Sam, the person?”

How will your company help drive that evolution? When companies purchase our product, they’re putting a stake in the ground. They’re saying, “We want to support you spending quality time outside of the office.” And that’s important. So, even by purchasing a product like Blueboard, you’re endorsing this idea that it’s important to have a life outside of the office. And I think some companies are scared to do that. It’s the same way that some companies don’t want their people taking PTO. That’s an old-fashioned mindset. And I think companies that open themselves to the fact that people do have lives outside of work, they do want to do things outside of work, and companies that align themselves with that message and put the dollars behind it to prove it—those are the companies that are going to attract the best talent.