Your Personal Assistant: Rearden Commerce CEO Patrick Grady (Part 3)

SM: Where did you gain traction? What types of investors were willing to support you? PG: I started working with other investment banks and high net worth private client groups. We started scaling up and investing in companies.

Your Personal Assistant: Rearden Commerce CEO Patrick Grady (Part 2)

SM: Valuations seldom work out in favor of the entrepreneur. I have written extensively about this. PG: There is a book called “Venture Capital at the Crossroads” which documents a lot of these issues. The book has case studies which showed that the average entrepreneur wound up with 3% of their own company at the

Read Full Article »

Your Personal Assistant: Rearden Commerce CEO Patrick Grady (Part 1)

Imagine the scenario of a senior executive on a business trip. Before the executive heads out to dinner a restaurant selection is in order. Enter Rearden Commerce and their virtual personal assistant. The executive simply opens the platform and receives restaurant recommendations. How? The platform already knows meal preferences, price ranges (per diem rate) which

Read Full Article »

Mark Hoffman’s Fourth Run: Enquisite (Part 7)

SM: What is going on in the market that justifies Enquisite coming into it today? MH: At the highest level, you have people switching off newspapers and magazines. Everyone is under a lot of pressure to deliver revenue. A lot of things are shifting to electronic commerce world and electronic advertising.

Mark Hoffman’s Fourth Run: Enquisite (Part 6)

SM: What kind of revenue ramp did you see in Commerce One? MH: We were doing about $200 million a quarter during our last big quarter. That was really from software sales, and a minimal amount from transaction revenues.

Mark Hoffman’s Fourth Run: Enquisite (Part 5)

SM: What is the story of Commerce One? How did you get involved there? MH: In 1995 I became the chairman of Sybase. It was a tough time in the market for database people and there were disagreements with the board.

Mark Hoffman’s Fourth Run: Enquisite (Part 4)

SM: What year did you take Sybase public? MH: That happened in 1991. I stayed there until 1995. SM: What was your experience like after Sybase became an established leader? MH: We grew it to 5,000 people. We had operations all over the world and I learned that companies go through phases.

Mark Hoffman’s Fourth Run: Enquisite (Part 3)

SM: In 1984 when you started Sybase with Bob Epstein, what was the funding environment? That was not in the heyday of venture capital. MH: Most of the venture capital was going into hardware companies. Very few software companies were being funded.