Sramana Mitra: There are a lot more hubs that have developed where interesting companies are built. You probably know Greg Gianforte who had built up a very interesting unorthodox place like Montana into a very nice technology destination. Louis Tetu: Technology is ubiquitous. Regardless of where we are, we all have the challenge of distributed
Robin has built an excellent company with large, international clients in the healthcare domain and has used the bootstrapping using services technique that we espouse in 1Mby1M. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised, and in what kind of circumstances? Robin Wiener:
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.
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
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
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
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
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