Replacing Founders with CEOs: A Discussion with Paul Doscher, CEO, Lucid Imagination (Part 3)

Sramana: What is the genesis of Lucid? What was the premise of the company? Paul Doscher: Lucid Imagination is the commercial software company that supports and sponsors the Apache projects Lucene and Solr. They are the leading open source technologies around enterprise search. The company was founded in November 2008 by some of the original

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Replacing Founders with CEOs: A Discussion with Paul Doscher, CEO, Lucid Imagination (Part 2)

Sramana: Where were you located when you worked at all of these companies in the Northeast? Paul Doscher: I moved to the West Coast after Business Objects. I became a vice president at Oracle for a $400 million business unit. I was traveling a lot and living a bi-coastal life. I still had my sons

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Replacing Founders with CEOs: A Discussion with Paul Doscher, CEO, Lucid Imagination (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Paul Doscher is the CEO of Lucid Imagination, a company that delivers enterprise-grade search development platforms based on Apache Lucene/Solr open source search. Prior to Lucid, Paul held the position of CEO for Exalead Inc, a global provider of enterprise search, where he led the company

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Bootstrapping to 8 Million from Brittany – Digitaleo CEO Jocelyn Denis (Part 7)

Sramana: How much of a market opportunity remains in France? If you did not make investments to expand outside of France, how big could you grow? Jocelyn Denis: I did an assessment of only the French market. There are 12 market segments we pursue there, and there are 200,000 potential customers in those markets. Currently

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Bootstrapping to 8 Million from Brittany – Digitaleo CEO Jocelyn Denis (Part 6)

Sramana: Emails have become multiplatform and multidevice. I have the exact same email trail on my phone, iPad, and computer. I can see it on every device. When it comes to text messaging, I can see it only on my phone. I don’t have a trail of it everywhere else. It’s not a business communication

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Bootstrapping to 8 Million from Brittany – Digitaleo CEO Jocelyn Denis (Part 5)

Sramana: Have you done any work in the U.S. yet? Jocelyn Denis: We opened a U.S. subsidiary a year ago and I am very happy. We did our market research by opening a subsidiary. You have to test a market first before you can modify and return with adaptation.

Bootstrapping to 8 Million from Brittany – Digitaleo CEO Jocelyn Denis (Part 4)

Sramana: Once you had established a profitable business in the text messaging area, what did you establish as your strategy for growth? Jocelyn Denis: In 2009 and 2010 I decided to invest more in multichannel platforms. We looked at things like customer satisfaction surveys over mobile phones. Retailers knew that customers were going on blogs,

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Bootstrapping to 8 Million from Brittany – Digitaleo CEO Jocelyn Denis (Part 3)

Sramana: How big was your business in 2006? Jocelyn Denis: In 2006 I hired my first employee and rented my first office. The business was profitable and has been profitable since the beginning. Sramana: How much revenue did you do in 2006? Jocelyn Denis: It would have been around 300,000 euros.