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Sam Decker

How an 8-Year Old Became Co-CMO


I have to share this story…it’s about how my son got offered the job of Co-CMO for Bazaarvoice.

Last week we had kids-at-work day. I brought in my 8-year-old son Kyle and 11-year-old daughter Haley in for half a day to experience my work. They were very excited, however, I had a number of meetings and conference calls. During these meetings my daughter colored, read, and ate ice cream. My son, on the other hand, walked the halls and started offering advice to our employees.

Soon, our Partnerships Director suggested he interview for a job. So, Kyle typed up an introductory letter and started interviewing with our recruiter and several Bazaarvoice managers. I still have no idea this is going on.

Soon Kyle gets into Brett’s office (our CEO). Brett interviews him and soon realizes that his skills of giving “tips, advice and opinions” on things like pricing and how to sell products align well with marketing. So he offers him the Co-CMO position — actually senior to me — paying $50/mo and 100 shares!

In the video below I compiled some clips that I and others collected that day, showing his interview with Brett and examples of the advice that he was giving me and our VP of Business Development, Brant Barton. None of this is staged for video, we just captured what was happening. He came up with all of this himself.


It doesn’t stop there. He collected 15 business cards and since Wednesday he’s been emailing my employees offering tips and advice ever since. He’s already given feedback on taglines, where we should have our summit next year, and how to approach partnership relationships. He also gave us some tagline ideas are:

  1. Bringing more customers and costumers to companies

  2. The ratings and reviews aggressiveness is sometimes how they make the company better.

  3. Get ratings and reviews from home or on the move

  4. Bazaarvoice builds other businesses way beyond wow by just doing ratings and reviews.

As a project, I suggested that he should read our web site and learn our products. His first job was to present back how he should market our products better. Here’s what he came up with, unedited:

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

We'll see where it goes from here, but I'm proud to be working for him! 🙂

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