Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of projects were you taking on during that time? Ajay Patel: Development projects. Sramana Mitra: So it had nothing to do with the legal industry? Ajay Patel: Not much, to be honest. Sramana Mitra: You got whatever you got and you did whatever you could get.

Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If I understand it correctly, you have not only the indexers and the crawlers but also connectors to different systems like Salesforce that then allows you to bring all that together in contact. Louis Tetu: You’re right. Obviously, you understand technology really well. Sramana Mitra: I’m a computer scientist from MIT. Louis Tetu: So we

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Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 2)

Ajay Patel: The vision was to build our own deal room or file sharing application and then license that to the legal industry. We put in our savings, which amounted to $30,000 and started HighQ. To this day, it is still a bootstrapped company. Having no money meant no salary, but it also meant that you had

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Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Our program is 100% based on this philosophy that you have to immerse yourself in customers and you have to understand the customer dynamics—why they buy, when they buy, and how they buy. Louis Tetu: If you do that, you can use seed capital to get very quickly to a use case and

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Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 1)

Continuing with our Bootstrapping Using Services theme, we bring you a story from London. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some back story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background? Ajay Patel: I was born in London about 42 years ago. I’ve lived here all my life. My origins

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Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Just to get the facts straight, you have a bunch of Fortune 50 companies starting to adopt the solution. You did the seed round yourself. What about the venture round? At what point in that adoption cycle did that venture round come in? I’m not talking about post-IPO. I’m talking about the pre-IPO

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Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In the case of HP as the anchor tenant, were they paying you? Louis Tetu: They were in exchange for significant development capacity and applications suited to their needs. Of course, we had the framework for that. As I said, we went to them with a concept of digital competence profile. That was a significant

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Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at Baan? Louis Tetu: I stayed at Baan until 1998. The dynamics of Baan at that time, without going into too much detail, had changed quite a bit. Several of us left. Several started other companies. I was 34 years old. I was doing some investments in multiple

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