Replacing Founders with CEOs: A Discussion with Paul Doscher, CEO, Lucid Imagination (Part 2)

Sramana: Where were you located when you worked at all of these companies in the Northeast?

Paul Doscher: I moved to the West Coast after Business Objects. I became a vice president at Oracle for a $400 million business unit. I was traveling a lot and living a bi-coastal life. I still had my sons living in New Jersey, so I spent my weekdays on airplanes and my weekends in New Jersey. With Business Objects, I moved to the West Coast full time and was based in Silicon Valley.

Sramana: What happened after you left Entrust?

Paul Doscher: When Entrust acquired us, it was for $750 million on a $25 million run rate. I left Entrust because they wanted the senior executives to move to Dallas, and I did not want to go there. I then worked for VMware. I was the head of worldwide operations at VMware. That was a very good opportunity, and I helped build out their global distribution strategy. I helped them build out their web sales, enterprise sales, indirect channels, and mid-market channels. A year later, I decided it was time to go do something else.

I went to a company called Thor, which was a startup. The company was headquartered in the World Trade Center. I joined them in late 2001, about two months after 9/11. That company was in the authentication and authorization space. I would commute to New York City and was the head of operations. It was a 20-person startup. They would authenticate users to various applications within the enterprise, which is a big security problem. When a new employee joins or leaves a company, his or her privileges need to change appropriately, and not all employees need the same level of privilege. At that time there was a big news story about an ex-employee who had betrayed a former employer. That employer still had access to accounts that they should not have had access to, and it was very harmful to the employer.

After a couple of years there, I got an opportunity to be a CEO at a small 20-person company in the business intelligence space. When I got there, I realized that the company was not going to get any traction until we changed the foundation of the company. We completely transformed from an enterprise software play to an open source business intelligence play and renamed it JasperSoft. We acquired the rights and development activity of an open source developer out of Romania. We had him join the company, and we re-launched as an open source company in late 2003.

I did that for four years and got that company off the ground before I left to lead Exalead, a company in the enterprise search space. It was a French company based out of Paris that had no presence in the U.S. They had tried a few times but had never gotten anywhere, so I came on board as the CEO of Exalead Americas. I ran that for three years before the company was acquired by another very large French company. I stayed for a year after the acquisition and left when I was offered the opportunity to become the CEO of Lucid Imagination.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Replacing Founders with CEOs: A Discussion with Paul Doscher, CEO, Lucid Imagination
1 2 3 4 5 6 7