Sramana Mitra: Belarus is not your own division? Bruno Lowagie: No, it’s not our own company. It’s a company with a subsidiary in Belgium. We pay the Belgian company but the people who work on iText are in Belarus. Sramana Mitra: How has revenue ramped? Bruno Lowagie: I believe that in 2011, we finished with $2.4
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During today’s roundtable, we celebrated the launch of my book, Billion Dollar Unicorns, with Therese Tucker, Founder and CEO of BlackLine. Therese is a very successful female entrepreneur who followed our core philosophy of bootstrap first, raise money later. When I first met her in 2009, her company was in the $10 million revenue range.
Sramana Mitra: Were you still in Gent? Bruno Lowagie: I was still in Gent and we’re still in Gent. In 2009, the list was finished and we didn’t find any new customers. We then made a bold move. We changed the old version of iText from the LGPL/MGPL to the AGPL. That’s a more viral license.
Bruno Lowagie: I asked what we can do to solve this. IBM said, “We have to do it the hard way.” Actuate was a company under the Eclipse umbrella. They entered a research agreement with Gent University. The deliverable was an IP overview. During 2007, I went to the university to do my job but as soon
Today’s 257th FREE online 1M/1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, April 30, at 8:00 a.m. PST/11:00 a.m. EST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join.
Sramana Mitra: Was this something that you created on the side? It was your own intellectual property. Bruno Lowagie: Yes. Sramana Mitra: This was in 2000? Bruno Lowagie: Yes. Sramana Mitra: What does that first release mean? Did you give it to the open source? Bruno Lowagie: I released it initially in LGPL library but then a
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Bhavin Parikh and his now departed co-founder Hansoo Lee have built Magoosh with textbook diligence and great discipline. Along the way, Hansoo died of lung cancer, a tragedy that hangs over the company both as misfortune and as inspiration. Read this wonderful story of young Berkeley