Replacing Founders with CEOs: A Discussion with Paul Doscher, CEO, Lucid Imagination (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Google made a tricky situation work.

Paul Doscher: They also held to a hiring standard that was not heard of before then.

SM: The real issue is that power struggle. They had a mature understanding between Eric, Larry, and Sergey about how the power was going to be shared. Mark Zuckerberg had a clear understanding of how power would be shared, but he also had the CEO title. Sergey and Larry did not have the CEO title, but they had the power. For me, the real issue is the power and understanding how the power will drive the dynamics of the company.

PD: I would suggest that the number of companies that you can look at which are successful with those dynamics are very few.

SM: Which is why most of my friends in the venture industry do not like to take on situations where they will have to change the CEO. That introduces the level of risk that very few firms these days want to take on.

PD: The person in that chair is ultimately the one who will be making decisions about management structure and strategy. That is there person to raise money to make the company successful. I think those dynamics are critical. I don’t know of many VC firms that are willing to take on an investment if they know they have to replace the founder.

SM: Let’s wrap up by summarizing your situation at Lucid. What are you doing, and what are you goals?

PD: I came into a company that was very much focused on services around open source technologies. That is not a scalable model and not one that VCs will invest in. We quickly pivoted the company into a licensed business and expanded the vision. Over the past six months we have put the company in a position to leverage recurring licensing revenue. The strategy and vision is that this open source technology is a key element of a big data technology stack. When you look at all of the content that an enterprise manages, you will see that 80% to 90% of it is unstructured, machine-generated content. That is not your traditional business intelligence paradigm. It is a transformative paradigm that will enable a huge growth of opportunity and value in the enterprise. Search is a key ingredient of that technology stack in terms of visualization of the content.

We have now launched a beta of our entire technology stack. We have also taken advantage of the opportunity the cloud provides in terms of enabling the company to do prototypes and quick ramp scenarios. We can build training and knowledge the product. The company has been running at a dead sprint for the past six months and has done a great job of executing. We are now moving into the early adopter phase of what will be a very transformative technology over the next three to six years. We are positioned very strongly for growth and additional investment. We are at an exciting place right now.

SM: It has been a pleasure. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us this morning.

PD: Thank you.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Replacing Founders with CEOs: A Discussion with Paul Doscher, CEO, Lucid Imagination
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