How This Next Billion-Dollar Startup Founder Went From Intern To CEO

Often, it takes just one person?one investor, cofounder, or even customer?to make an entrepreneurial dream a reality. For Andrew Lau, it was Phil Braden and Dave Gourley who changed it all. Dave first hired Andrew as an intern in 1999, when they were both working for a tech startup in Boston. Shortly thereafter, Andrew, Dave and Phil found themselves working together in the early 2000s at Endeca, an e-commerce search engine acquired by Oracle for more than $1 billion in 2011. Eventually, the trio joined forced to cofound Jellyfish, a software company aiming to do for engineering what Salesforce did for marketing. Jellyfish landed on the Forbes list of the Next Billion-Dollar Startups in 2023 and Andrew?once the intern of the group?is the company?s CEO. This journey would not have been possible, he says, with anyone other than Dave and Phil.