Optimizing Websites With Machine Learning: BloomReach CEO Raj De Datta (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Raj De Datta is the CEO and co-founder of BloomReach, the world’s first web relevance engine. Prior to founding BloomReach, Raj was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mohr-Davidow Ventures. Prior to that he was the director of product marketing at Cisco. Prior to Cisco he was part of

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Building An Enterprise Software Company From Europe: President Of Neolane North America, Stephan Dietrich (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Did you build a direct U.S. sales force? Stephan Dietrich: Yes. We did that right away. That is why we raised the money. You cannot go into a country with one or two people. We needed to have 15 people to cover sales, marketing, consulting, training, and support. I moved over with my

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Building An Enterprise Software Company From Europe: President Of Neolane North America, Stephan Dietrich (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do that allowed you to penetrate the U.S. market in a significant way? You raised money for that purpose in 2006; what was the strategy? How did you build the business from 2006 on? Stephan Dietrich: We still have not penetrated the U.S. market totally. We won deals against the

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Building An Enterprise Software Company From Europe: President Of Neolane North America, Stephan Dietrich (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What was your financing strategy for Neolane? You said that the founders bootstrapped the company. Have you taken on any institutional investment to date? Stephan Dietrich: We started with our own money. We knew that with the dot-com crash it would be very difficult to get funding. Our team was not intimidated by

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Building An Enterprise Software Company From Europe: President Of Neolane North America, Stephan Dietrich (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In 2001, if I had been evaluating all of the marketing automation providers out there, what would have been the use case that would have made me pick Neolane? Stephan Dietrich: One of our first clients was an online brokerage firm in France. They needed to communicate effectively with their consumers about daily

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Building An Enterprise Software Company From Europe: President Of Neolane North America, Stephan Dietrich (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Did you feel that your skill sets in big data would give you a competitive advantage? Stephan Dietrich: We were fascinated by the skills we had developed around data and profiling. We knew we had the skill sets to manage large databases. Back then, large databases were 1 terabyte databases that acquired data

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Building An Enterprise Software Company From Europe: President Of Neolane North America, Stephan Dietrich (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The three of you worked together and sold your first software company. When was that? Stephan Dietrich: That software company was acquired in 1995. There are ups and downs to creating a company like that. We started it in late 1992 and sold it in 1995, but it was not a straight line.

Building An Enterprise Software Company From Europe: President Of Neolane North America, Stephan Dietrich (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Stephan Dietrich is a co-founder and the president of North America for Neolane, a provider of conversational marketing technology. He has 15 years’ experience in enterprise software and marketing expertise in the high-tech field. Previously he was president of Cubicsoft and co-founder of AGDS, which was

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