Sramana: What was your next career step after your successful project for the State of Texas? Mohammed Farooq: In 1999, a guy called Manoj Saxena started a company in Austin and I became his first employee. I joined them on a journey of entrepreneurship. When I was working for the State of Texas in the
Tomas Gorny: When I was living in Germany, I was 17 years old and had learned the language. I decided that the PC industry is growing, so I started a PC distribution company. We were buying different PC components from vendors, assembling them to computers, and then selling them to businesses and individuals. What I started
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. We continue to see exciting enterprise software companies being built by entrepreneurs who have roots in the consulting business and who have taken their domain knowledge and customer insights to develop compelling products to solve specific problems. Gravitant is yet another case in point. Sramana: Mohammed,
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. I see so many people making excuses for why they are not successful – discrimination, fate, luck, all external factors. Read Tomas Gorny’s story. I hope it will give you some perspective and some attitude adjustment that hopefully propels success. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with
Sramana: How well has the company grown? Michael Seifert: We have roughly 10% of the global market share. Sramana: How does the market share split up? Who is number 1? Michael Seifert: There are many vendors in our market. I usually describe this as an oasis battlefield out there. The group at the top is
Sramana: Could you give me an example of some of your customers? Michael Seifert: One of the better examples is one of Europe’s largest airlines, easyJet. When they went live on Sitecore a few years back, they had a huge launch strategy, which is normal for large enterprises. When you turn on the new site
Sramana: What is an example of a capability beyond building websites? Michael Seifert: You can say that once you start gathering information about website visitors, you start to learn a lot about them. Crafting personal emails is a natural extension from that. At that time, we started to explore email marketing, mobile technologies, and many
Sramana: You said Sitecore was profitable from the very beginning. How long did it take you to reach $1 million in revenue? Michael Seifert: I think we had about $500,000 our first year. We reached a million dollars the year after. Sramana: Was Sitecore a pure product company, with services left to the sister company?