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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 6)
Sramana: It sounds like the legitimacy of e-signatures for legal purposes really changed the entire direction of the company. Tommy Petrogiannis: That really changed us as a company because we moved from within the walls of an organization to outside the walls of an organization. We gave them the ability to interact with customers without
Bootstrapping Using Services from Montreal, Canada: Silanis CEO Tommy Petrogiannis (Part 5)
Sramana: Outside of the DoD contracts, where did you get the remainder of your revenue? Tommy Petrogiannis: It came from industries that were regulated and needed operational efficiencies. This included pharmaceuticals, aerospace manufacturing, and lots of departmental sales for paperwork efficiencies. After the DoD, manufacturing was our next largest vertical followed by aerospace manufacturing. We knew
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.