Secret Sauce

We were born at the right time,” said Scott Bentley, singling out the Bentley brothers’ good fortune to grow up at the very moment when Delaware’s Project DELTA was introducing high schoolers to the rudiments of programming. “We got into computers back when it was a mystery. It was a black box to almost everybody. And we found the people who could crack that black box.”

Barry likewise cited the role of serendipity, remarking on how he and Keith benefitted early on from a string of “fortuitous circumstances,” ranging from Intergraph’s initial disinterest in the program that became PseudoStation to CalTech’s timely purchase of a DEC VAX minicomputer the brothers could use at night when nobody else was around.

Jim Bartlett emphasized a subtler aspect of the founders’ timing. “By the mid-1980s you had a group of people who were accustomed to having access to the computer themselves,” he pointed out. “These were engineering students doing their own computer programming”—focusing on solving problems that mattered to engineers. Keith, Barry, Ray, and other early Bentley Systems developers exemplified that dynamic. “It developed a lot of trust between the users and the developers, and it helped us move really fast because we were actually talking to the end users— not just a customer support department who goes to a marketing department, who goes to an executive, who goes to an end user.

This was the programmer talking to the user. When the phone rang and somebody said, ‘Oh, I want to talk to a developer about something,’ the Bentleys would say, ‘Yeah, you have to talk to him.’ There was no insulation.”

Colleagues not named Bentley frequently invoked “the sheer intellect of the brothers,” as JB Monnier put it. “How they work together, how fair they are, and how smart they are,” he said, created “a recipe which is totally unique.”

The brothers acknowledged their own strengths but insistently shifted the spotlight away from themselves. In one way or another, they all identified collaboration and delegation as the lifeblood of the company’s culture. “Barry and Ray are extremely capable problem solvers,” said Keith. “That we had two of those at the beginning of the company was huge. And of course we’ve hired many other people that I would also consider virtuoso programmers.”

Greg noted that the company’s success on his watch depended in part on what he didn’t do. “I wasn’t needed to help on the technical side, and I didn’t,” he reflected. “When I get asked, ‘Is there something about you being a family company, and having these five brothers, that contributed to your success?’ I say, ‘Yes, it is the technical continuity—my brothers have had their hands on our software every day of 40 years, and have a real opinion that they act on and lead in.”

“Keith really is our visionary,” Barry declared. “Raymond will take a problem that he doesn’t know a damn thing about, fearlessly wade in, and get it mostly working. And then Greg supplies all the drive. I like to think that I’m the moderating influence on all three of those guys.”

“We needed Scotty in the early going—though I think he was ultimately better suited to a small company,” Barry added. “And I’m really excited about our next generation of leaders. I think they are going to be great. They already are.”

“It’s tempting for people to say, ‘Well, they’re geniuses,’” said Bartlett about the brothers. “I know from working with them that they chafe at that idea. They would be more likely to tell you that none of them thinks they’re Albert Einstein. They would say instead, ‘Look, it’s only software and it’s only business—and it’s not like either of those two is that hard.’ I had the privilege of meeting and getting to know their father Tom a little bit—and I can see where it comes from,” Bartlett added. “Tom liked to see people just solving problems, and he wasn’t going to spend a lot of time patting you on the back for what you did yesterday—it’s, What you are solving today? It’s the same thing reflected through them: they just pitch in and start solving it, and they never admit that a problem is hard.”

“The Bentleys themselves are the key,” said Malcolm Walter, who drew attention less to their brain power than their personal decency. “They are really good people, and people you want to work with and work for, doing your best for our clients. When Keith showed up at a conference, everyone wanted to talk to him. It was about more than respect—these people had made their careers based upon using Bentley’s tools, and the Bentleys were humbled by it and wanted to do the best for them. So if somebody had a complaint about how it worked, they took that as an opportunity to make things better, as opposed to just dismissing it as a complaint. It was just the way that they operated. It made for a wonderful working environment for people. And our clients loved it. And by the way, the tools were damn good. So there was a lot to be happy about.”

A work ethic that began at the top—visible in the dawn arrival of the brothers’ cars in the parking lot—was another theme.

“I’d say 60 percent of success is showing up every day,” said Barry, “and we certainly were able to do that.”

“Nothing motivates you more than your boss putting in a hard day’s work,” said Singh, who stressed the “growth mindset” that kept their labor from becoming a grind. “For an original founder group to go from zero to a billion” dollars in annual revenue “is so rare, and can only happen if there’s a growth mindset,” he declared. “There was a lot of freedom to explore new ways of doing things.”

Greg observed that intellectual openness was not limited to the company’s software savants or strategic thinkers. “Something in our culture is that we have ended up with people in our go-to-market functions and sales and marketing who love to learn, and are excited when we have something new coming along,” he reflected. “We have attracted the people who say, ‘Yeah, I have a chance to learn that now—and it really is interesting. I love learning new stuff.’”

There were also opportunities for change and renewal. “I think every two years I had a different job,” Singh remarked. “I got uncomfortable when I got comfortable, so I would always put my hat in the ring for something new. And when they saw me put a hat in the ring, they would give me new stuff. So it sort of fed on itself.”

That was a common sentiment. JB Monnier spoke about moving between roles in product management, distribution and marketing—and ranging even more widely in geographical terms. After stints in North America, Europe, and China, he took on the challenge of emerging markets, eventually deciding to “kind of become homeless and spend a month in Indonesia and month in India and a month in Russia or whatever.”

“One of the great things about Bentley is how many opportunities there are,” said George Church. “Colleagues can have multiple careers without leaving the company.” He chuckled at the memory of a consultant who’d been brought in at some point to advise colleagues on how to use LinkedIn better. Church’s profile, which identified him as a senior executive of 20 years standing, didn’t come close to telling the story of how many roles he’d occupied and challenges he’d faced.

That was because he fundamentally saw himself the way he saw his Bentley peers—as being more focused on missions than titles. “Scott was out there hustling and getting orders,” he said. “Ray just sat in his cubicle with his fish tank and worked on really hard problems,” he continued. “I was a guy who just went off and solved problems and fixed things.”

“All these guys were fun to work with,” reflected Malcolm Walter, “because they saw their job as getting stuff done. We were not here to simply collect a paycheck. We were here to actually get something done, and that really made working with them incredibly fun.”

Another hallmark of the company’s culture was the juxtaposition of family-centric values and international reach.

“From the day I met the Bentleys, I’ve always felt like the company was a family company,” said Gus Bergsma. “And I like that. I’m kind of a sucker for a team, and family and group commitment.”

Countless colleagues spoke with fondness about Easter and Halloween and Christmas parties where the term “Bentley kids” referred to scores of children bearing all manner of surnames. What was harder to explain, but just as important to many of them, was how that spirit coexisted with Bentley’s global ambitions.

“One thing that was incredible is it became very international very quickly,” marveled Carey Mann. “I remember being at a meeting very early on in Hoofddorp, and I looked around the table and there were a dozen of us and not one of us grew up in the same country. Yet it didn’t feel like they were foreigners to you, because we all spoke a common language—we all understood the software and the markets. I always loved that about Bentley. I think we all feel fortunate that we got to work with such a diverse group of colleagues, and that most of us got to travel and see significant parts of the world.”

“What I think was unique,” said David Hollister, “was walking this tightrope between embracing a family culture, while also providing everything that’s interesting and stimulating and challenging about a large and complex global business. Usually you don’t see both of those in the same place. I think we found a pretty good formula for embracing the best of both of those.

“We had owners and primary shareholders who were there in the trenches with us every day,” he went on. “When I say family, I mean literally family—but that also sort of infected the rest of the business, because it was a family of incredibly successful people who always had their feet on the ground and were very approachable. They fostered this culture of respect and accountability.”

In Greg’s view, binding a diverse group of talented colleagues depended on an indispensable ingredient. “Shared equity is the secret sauce especially for a software company,” he declared. “A lesson learned by the time we were all in our second business, at Bentley Systems, is how important it is for everyone to have a piece of the action.”

Harry Vitelli concurred, echoing many colleagues. “Greg and the team shared stock with us during the early days,” he observed, “And it should be said that not every CEO in a company like that is willing to.”

Many colleagues felt that the company valued them in multiple ways, including for their capacity to voice diverse opinions and take calculated risks. “I think people were generally empowered,” said Carey Mann. “It wasn’t an organization that was run by fiat—it was very much a lot of creativity. There were sometimes competing efforts within different parts of the organization, and that wasn’t by accident, because ‘let the best ideas win’ was sometimes the mantra.”

“There’s this honesty,” said Gino Cortesi, “that’s always been at the core of Bentley that I feel is integral, and has always driven things. It’s kind of proven by my career itself,” he added. “You know, what kind of company would bring on a vocal critic of their own product and work with them to shape that? To me, that showed that there’s some boldness there.”

“The company had a culture of respect—for ideas, differences, mistakes,” said Hollister. “There wasn’t this massive fear of failing. There was just accountability: It was our company. We owned it. We weren’t going anywhere. We weren’t afraid to invest in what was best for the long term.”

“Greg would take care of me better than I would take care of myself,” said JB Monnier. “Keith was always welcoming, and he had this humane mix of being kind but strong. I mean, we disagreed on a bunch of things,” he added, “but they never tackled the leg, they always tackled the ball. You know where their values are, and I think that kept me going.”

That got at an aspect of Bentley’s culture that came up repeatedly in colleagues’ reflections: the company was a place where trust could flourish.

“The speed with which you can operate is fully dependent on the sense of trust that you have developed with those people,” observed Jim Bartlett. “Advancement that happens at the speed of trust strikes me as a nice way to describe what was happening initially at Bentley. Keith, Barry, and Ray completely trusted each other. With the first half-dozen or dozen senior programmers, there was an implicit and complete sense of trust. No one was looking over your shoulder. You were delegated. It led to a sense of trust, but also a sense of complete accountability. If you owned one of those problems, you owned it and it had to be solved. And it’s that simple. You get it done.

“And you could extrapolate from that,” Bartlett went on. “There’s a certain amount of trust that comes from the users to Bentley: that we will deal with their problems, that we will solve them. We just showed up every day and solved problems.”

That sense of trust begat many good things: excellence, solidarity, fellowship, a sense of purpose, loyalty, and lasting bonds of affection. Many, many friendships were genuine enough to survive the transition to retirement. Whether they were raising glasses of Scotch over Zoom in scheduled social hours or taking multi-family pleasure trips to far-flung destinations, colleagues found ways to stay connected.

“Some of my best, closest friends are former and current colleagues,” said David Hollister, “and I expect that to be always the case.”For all the fondness and respect the brothers inspired, what many colleagues seemed to appreciate most was the authentic way they projected their values and spirit throughout the company.

“Bentley is great at colleague loyalty,” reflected Ted Lamboo. “I think there’s been fantastic shareholder loyalty—and I particularly mean the Bentleys. I have absolutely every highest regard for how the Bentleys have committed themselves to it.” Their commitment, he suggested, proved contagious. “It is that entire group that built Bentley into a unique company, and I really think that’s what differentiated us against the competition—who were known to replace people very frequently.”

“Our loyalty created loyalties as well,” he went on, drawing a parallel that encompassed the relationships between the company and its users. “We have had, and have, very loyal Bentley teams. And I think that DNA is Bentley DNA.”

Lamboo shared a memory that may serve as a fitting endpoint to a story whose next chapter will be written by men and women whose surnames don’t appear on the company’s letterhead. For a surprising number of years, he mused, he remained the only Ted at Bentley Systems. Inevitably the day came when a second one arrived—bearing a last name that preceded his in alphabetical order.

So occasionally emails intended for Ted Lamboo wound up in Ted Johnson’s inbox. “So I’ve always told Ted Johnson, ‘You can call yourself whatever you want, but I’m Ted 1!’” Lamboo chuckled.

But Lamboo also had another way of looking at it. Recollecting all the years he spent with the company, and the jobs and internships each of his children held, and the friendships that outlasted his retirement, and the sense of purpose that cemented them, he paused and reached for words that could take the measure of it all.

“It’s a Bentley family,” he said. “I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s been our lives. I’m Ted Bentley.”

“If you cut me in half,” he added, “there’s a Bentley logo inside.”