Sid Banerjee is founder and chief strategy officer of Clarabridge, a Reston-based company that develops customer-experience software.

Clarabridge is the second company Banerjee has founded in Fairfax County. He sold his first startup, big-data firm Claraview, which is now part of Think Big Analytics, a Teradata Company. 

Banerjee recently spoke with E-Bird Extra about the technology ecosystem that supports innovation and entrepreneurism in Fairfax County and northern Virginia, and how it's grown in the last two decades.

	Clarabridge founder and CSO Sid Banerjee. (Photo Clarabridge)

E-Bird Extra: How did you get started as an entrepreneur and what led you to found Clarabridge?

Sid Banerjee: My first real exposure to the entrepreneurship culture here came when I joined MicroStrategy with some colleagues that I met while at MIT. We built a company that peaked at over 2,000 people in the late 90s and went through ups and downs in the dot.com boom-and-bust culture. After being at MicroStrategy for close to nine years, I was very steeped in the culture of startup companies. I wanted to build another company.

EE: What made you feel comfortable about starting Clarabridge here?

SB: I felt very comfortable that the people I was able to tap to build my first company (Claraview) were the same kinds of people I had gotten to know working at MicroStrategy. We cast a big net and were very pleased to find talent here that had the skills and mindset to be part of a startup company. We were also able to grow through training and learning and developing people because the talent base here is very high-quality. Northern Virginia talent is very adaptive and learning- oriented -- you can find the high quality people who will learn and grow with you as you build a business.

EE: What has been your experience in terms of acquiring funding?

SB: W hen we launched Clarabridge in 2006, we did need outside capital and we found the region had quite a few angels and Series A investors who were very eager to hear our business plan and invest in our company. I received offers from several local venture investors that were based in northern Virginia. With our most recent expansion round in 2012, most of the offers were from out of the region -- from Boston, San Francisco and New York -- and we decided to take money from Boston investors. I think that represents partly what's happened in the D.C. and northern Virginia market over the last decade -- Northern Virginia has a reputation for high-quality later-stage companies, and out-of-market investors have started to focus on investing in good companies in the region. There are hundreds of great companies here and investors are looking for opportunities to invest and to grow and nurture those businesses.

Hear more from Sid Banerjee of Clarabridge, speaking at last year's Capital Data Summit

EE: How does a non-government business do well in northern Virginia?

SB: Yes, we're only 15 miles away from the White House. But when you think about what you need to establish and grow a high-quality business -- not only a government business but a global business -- you need good people. You need the ability to promise those people a good lifestyle and access to the things that good people care about, which include good schools, good infrastructure, culture. And you need the kind of access to capital to invest and grow your business. And we have that in Northern Virginia. It's been proven out by my experiences at Claraview, Clarabridge, and my prior experiences at MicroStrategy.

EB: What is the most innovative aspect of your company?
SB: Clarabridge sells to big banks, telecom companies, retailers who are trying to make sense of the hundreds of millions of pieces of feedback that come every year when customers interact with a business or when customers talk about a business online. We connect to all of those conversations and use advanced learning algorithms to understand the themes, the service issues, the product issues that correlate to you being a loyal customer, to you being an unhappy customer, to you churning as a customer and going to a competitor, so that they can continue to keep learning and adapt the product and services to keep you and all the other millions of customers they serve loyal and happy and profitable. We do that by using language sentiment, theme detection and a lot of predictive and statistical algorithms to make sense of what are essentially "conversations."

EB: How would you describe the tech ecosystem here?

SB: I've seen the D.C. area become a magnet for smart college graduates. When we recruit, we'll often recruit to the local colleges north and south of us as well as into D.C. But we find a lot of two- to five-year graduates already in the region who are looking for the kind of entrepreneurial activities that we can offer them. The D.C. region has also become much more cosmopolitan. The Metro has made it much easier for people to think about the northern Virginia area as a real urban, cosmopolitan area, which is helpful for recruiting a certain type of creative worker.

The tech ecosystem is growing and diversifying, and like Silicon Valley -- tech leaders are tightly networked and connected. I know many fellow founders, CEOs and business leaders in the region, and we are friends, colleagues, and supporters of our enterprises and the region. The ecosystem is strong and growing. I think the D.C. and northern Virginia regions are developing into a very healthy and robust tech ecosystem.

EB: Why is Fairfax County a good place for innovation?

SB: Fairfax County is a good place for innovation because we have access to people. We have access to the technical infrastructure to build great companies - with the software developers, the hosting infrastructure, and the geographic convenience that lets companies expand from this market around the world. And we have a culture of people wanting to build great things. This is not a market where there's a lot of job-hopping. If you build a good company and you have good technology and good strategy for going to market, you will find people who will commit 150, 200 percent to making your company great.