Replacing Founders with CEOs: A Discussion with Paul Doscher, CEO, Lucid Imagination (Part 3)

Sramana: What is the genesis of Lucid? What was the premise of the company?

Paul Doscher: Lucid Imagination is the commercial software company that supports and sponsors the Apache projects Lucene and Solr. They are the leading open source technologies around enterprise search. The company was founded in November 2008 by some of the original committers to the Lucene and Solar projects. They were very deep into the technologies and were primary committers anointed by Appache.

They felt the technology and the marketplace had matured to the point where it would be lucrative to have a software company sponsor and promote the technologies, similar to Red Hat and MySQL. They founded the company and received initial $6 million of funding from two VC firms and they did a series B in 2010 that raised another $10 million, led by Granite Ventures and In-Q-Tel.

Sramana: You have an interesting background, yet you were not one of the founders of Lucid. Would you talk some about your career path and how it has led you to being the CEO of an open source company?

Paul Doscher: I always felt that if I were going to achieve goals I set for myself in terms of my career, I had to be in control of making the decisions about my career. At every junction I could have stayed and had a nice career. I always felt like I had the opportunity to do more, and my ultimate goal was to be a CEO. I am not a technologist, which is what you see all the time in the Valley. However, I always felt that I was a good manager and envisioning the opportunity that a company could be. I have always been able to hire the right people to fulfill that vision. That is really what my career has become. I am a turnaround specialist. I am not in the series A, but I do take the raw material and put in a vision and strategy around the company and then go out and hire the team to make it successful.

I see entrepreneurs struggle with those dynamics. Founders are not typically the ones who have the full package. They often struggle when it comes time to build a team, or they don’t know how to package their creations in a way that lets the market adopt them. I think there is a phrase associated with Google and Facebook that says code will always win.

Sramana: That is not a true statement, surely. There are a lot of dynamics.

Paul Doscher: Certainly, but I think at the end of the day good technology is a must. Oracle always claimed to have the best database, but people who know their stuff will tell you that Ingres had the best technology. Oracle won because they out marketed everybody. They were focused, decisive and ruthless in execution. It takes a village. You need capital, you need a good management structure, a team that can work together, and you need solid technology. You have to solve a real business problem that somebody is willing to write a check for.

Sramana: I see a lot of experience in your career of joining founding teams and taking over as the CEO. Would you talk about how you navigate those scenarios? CEO transitions are of huge interest to our audience.

Paul Doscher: It is a tough transition. The founder has spent all the sleepless nights raising money and developing the technology. He put his heart and soul into his creations, and suddenly everything is handed over to someone else. That is tough. I can tell you from experience that it is a tough transition that rarely works, which is a tough thing for a founder to wrap his head around. The founder always tries to take on a CTO, product or technical role that keeps them intimate. However, to relinquish the day-to-day decision making is very difficult for the founder to do. When you bring in an outside CEO, you need to work as hard as you can to effect a smooth transition. If the founder can park their egos and focus on their goals, then it can work.

The thing is, entrepreneurs generally tend to have an ego to begin with. That is why they take the risk, they believe in themselves. That is what makes the successful. It is hard for them to see themselves in a different light. I think in more than half of the cases it has not been possible to keep the founders involved.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Replacing Founders with CEOs: A Discussion with Paul Doscher, CEO, Lucid Imagination
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