Bootstrapping from Belgium: iText CEO Bruno Lowagie (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What about business strategy? Not every company can, by the nature of their business, grow to $500 million. That’s what the VCs are looking for. By the nature of your business, how big a business can you build? Bruno Lowagie: If we continue what we are doing now, I don’t think we’re going

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Bootstrapping from Belgium: iText CEO Bruno Lowagie (Part 6)

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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257th Roundtable Recording On April 30, 2015: With Therese Tucker, BlackLine

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

Roundtable Recap: April 30 – Billion Dollar Unicorns with Therese Tucker, CEO of BlackLine

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.

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Bootstrapping from Belgium: iText CEO Bruno Lowagie (Part 5)

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.

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Bootstrapping from Belgium: iText CEO Bruno Lowagie (Part 4)

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

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257th Roundtable For Entrepreneurs Starting NOW, Live Tweeting By @1Mby1M

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.

Bootstrapping from Belgium: iText CEO Bruno Lowagie (Part 3)

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

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