The Conversation: New Unbounce CEO and veteran executive Steve Oriola on how his company can rebound from layoffs and a turbulent tech sector

Steve Oriola’s resume almost reads like that of a hockey coach. In the last 11 years, Oriola has held the CEO position at five different organizations. Those have included advertising firm Crossword Mobile, CRM provider Pipedrive, influencer marketing platform Julius and marketing SaaS biz Act!. That doesn’t even include a stint with a VC firm where he helped managed portfolio companies as an executive in residence.

So yeah, he knows a few things about coming into a company with fresh eyes and setting a new tone. That’s likely a big reason that he was tapped to be the new CEO of landing page creator Unbounce in January.

Denver-based private equity firm Crest Rock Partners owns a controlling stake in the company and, in 2022, Unbounce laid off some 20 percent of its workforce amid the struggles of a downturn in the economy. Three weeks ago, the company acquired San Francisco-based CRM firm Insightly.

BCBusiness spoke to Oriola over Google Meet from his home in New York.

You’ve been at Unbounce since January. How have the last eight months been?

Busy. You know, you spend a few months just getting to know the organization and the people—there’s lot of talent in the company, no doubt. And we’re owned by a private equity firm. You know what they do for a living? They buy things. So the opportunity presented itself and we acquired Insightly, and there’s all sorts of excitement about the strategic fit with the two organizations.

How has the merging of the two companies gone so far?

Well, we’re only a couple of weeks into it, and these things generally take several months to a year. But largely, between now and the end of the year is when we’ll push to have an integrated organization.

We have a data engineering team that’s got some heft and has, you know, really turned the landing page platform into an experimentation and optimization platform as much as a landing page builder. And so the marketing automation platform that [Insightly has] is really something we can sink our chops into to find ways to integrate those platforms together. They know the sales buyer and we know the marketing buyer.

How many employees do you have now that the companies have combined? 

We’re north of 200 employees.

You’re based in New York, how often do you come out to Vancouver?

I’ve been to Vancouver since January four times, I was just there. But I’ll probably be there eight-to-10 times a year. But you know, we have 30-plus employees in Toronto and Insightly has a lot of people in the Bay Area. There’s a mix of Canadian and American people on our leadership team—our VP of marketing is in Florida; we have an office in Berlin. So it’s definitely a global company.

Is it different working for a company that’s headquartered in Canada in any way?

Other than Canadian employee laws, not really. But I’ve worked globally for a long time and dealt with different legal things. The differences aren’t that big.

What’s your leadership style like?

Very inclusive. And decisively so. I get a lot of input from the people around me. I hire people into jobs that I’m not qualified for that are super smart in their domain, and I trust them generally. But if decisions need making, I can make them.

You came into a company that seemed to be going through a bit of turmoil. Have there been any tough decisions you’ve had to make in the first eight months?

Yeah, a little bit. I’ve had to make some difficult decisions. On the product and technology front, there were some products I didn’t think were fruitful. And we had to make a few pivots where there was not unanimity, I would say. But that’s pretty normal. Especially if you come into something that’s relatively new. So yeah, I had to make some quick decisions for sure.

And we had to make some changes to the processes and the way the work has been done, because I have a lot of experience at scale. And some people took that really well and welcomed it. Others didn’t. And that again is pretty standard stuff.

Do you feel confident that Unbounce is headed out of that rocky period? Generally in Vancouver’s tech sector it’s been tough of late but do you feel Unbounce is back on smooth ground?

Yeah, I do. I feel like we have the right team and the right organization and we’re appropriately sized for the revenue that we’re at. So I don’t feel like the organization is overstaffed or that we don’t have the right skills. Those are the things that I was looking for as soon as I walked in the door. And there were probably some odd staffing levels in certain functional areas and things like that, but the skill levels were all pretty high. It was clear that Unbounce had attracted some of the best talent. And I think that largely has to do with the brand. There’s a lot of brand equity here, especially in Vancouver, and I don’t want to lose that. But we also don’t want people working in the company to feel as though they’re being left out because they’re not in Vancouver. It’s an interesting dynamic.

And where do you see the company going in the next one to two years?

Well, I see a full integration and us becoming more of an all-in-one platform as a solution that’s comprehensive across almost all the functional areas of business, but primarily sales and marketing.

In your four trips to Vancouver this year what have you noticed? What do you think about the city?

The city itself is beautiful. I came in January and February and wanted to ski but there was no snow. So I’m very hopeful I can ski locally next winter. But also, the Canadian culture, it’s just very friendly. I found that in the company, too. Just really welcoming.

This interview has been edited and condensed.