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HOT TOPICS
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
Bootstrapping Using Services from Montreal, Canada: Silanis CEO Tommy Petrogiannis (Part 4)
Sramana: So you really focused on selling to clients who had a workflow or process improvement need? Was any of it regulatory based? Tommy Petrogiannis: Yes. We got very lucky in 1996 when the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon ended up buying an enterprise license from us and they standardized on our product.
Bootstrapping Using Services from Montreal, Canada: Silanis CEO Tommy Petrogiannis (Part 3)
Sramana: It sounds like you found a niche working on digital signatures to enable paperless workflows well before it became a standardized business practice. Tommy Petrogiannis: A lot of what we developed is commonplace today. In 1994, we were the first company to embed signatures into a PDF document. Adobe did it six years later. Today that
Bootstrapping Using Services from Montreal, Canada: Silanis CEO Tommy Petrogiannis (Part 2)
Sramana: You started up a company with some friends around 1992 where you did consulting around pen-based computing. Is that the same company you have today? Tommy Petrogiannis: Yes, it is. We took the original outcome of that first consulting engagement and realized it was an opportunity that we could build a business off of.
Bootstrapping Using Services from Montreal, Canada: Silanis CEO Tommy Petrogiannis (Part 1)
If you haven’t read my Bootstrapping Using Services book, you must. Here’s yet another case study following the same methodology. Sramana: Tommy, let’s start with your backstory. Where are you from? Tommy Petrogiannis: I was born and raised in Montreal, Canada and I still live there. Both of my parents are first generation immigrants. Watching
Bootstrapping a Language Product Company Using Services from London, Then Taking it Public and Scaling It to $450M: SDL CEO Mark Lancaster (Part 7)
Sramana: You have made a lot of acquisitions building your business. When did your rollup strategy start? Mark Lancaster: As soon as we floated. When you go public, you have to understand what the public wants. Most of our shares are held by large institutions. The London Stock Exchange is much different than NASDAQ. They
Bootstrapping a Language Product Company Using Services from London, Then Taking it Public and Scaling It to $450M: SDL CEO Mark Lancaster (Part 6)
Sramana: Let’s move our discussion forward to the product era of your company. What were some of the milestones in building that phase of the business? Mark Lancaster: We probably started very slowly on the software side. Over the first three years, in the 1999 timeframe, we were doing less than $3 million in software revenues.
Bootstrapping a Language Product Company Using Services from London, Then Taking it Public and Scaling It to $450M: SDL CEO Mark Lancaster (Part 5)
Sramana: The other side of that coin is that the UK does not have a lot of technology companies. VCs who want to invest in the UK are looking for strong companies and don’t have as many opportunities. Mark Lancaster: At that particular time, the company was all services and was just starting to develop
Bootstrapping a Language Product Company Using Services from London, Then Taking it Public and Scaling It to $450M: SDL CEO Mark Lancaster (Part 4)
Sramana: What is the composition of your business? Are you selling these products to software companies who do translation work themselves, or are you selling it to competing services companies who compete with you using your own products? Mark Lancaster: About 50% of our revenue is derived from technology. Since that very early translation technology,