Sramana Mitra: There are a lot more hubs that have developed where interesting companies are built. You probably know Greg Gianforte who had built up a very interesting unorthodox place like Montana into a very nice technology destination. Louis Tetu: Technology is ubiquitous. Regardless of where we are, we all have the challenge of distributed
Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at Baan? Louis Tetu: I stayed at Baan until 1998. The dynamics of Baan at that time, without going into too much detail, had changed quite a bit. Several of us left. Several started other companies. I was 34 years old. I was doing some investments in multiple
This interview gives us an opportunity to speak with a seasoned enterprise software entrepreneur who has founded and scaled a number of companies, including Taleo that went public, and was eventually acquired by Oracle for $1.9 billion. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? Where were you
Sramana: In terms of completing the story, bringing us up to 2014, there are few interesting questions I would like to ask. What are some of the other major strategic moves that you made? Brian Requarth: Let me summarize one thing, say financing. I organized the financing in several buckets. After pooling from friends and family, in the first
Sramana: By the time he invested in your business, had he already sold the business in England? Brian Requarth: Yes, he already had an exit in 2007, three weeks before the financial crisis. He was 27 years old. He sold it for a lot of money and when he came down to Colombia, I told him
Sramana: Tell me more about financing, what was the financing strategy that you followed in the company? Brian Requarth: We decided to bootstrap for a long time. Sramana: How long did you bootstrap? Brian Requarth: We started in 2007. We didn’t have cash flow to support the expansion to Brazil in 2009. In 2010, my family invested a little
Sramana: How long did you do a critical mass of a particular listing such that the marketplace on the other side would become interesting? Brian Requarth: During that time, we didn’t have enough listings from customers that we were offering free trials to. So we actually built a robot to go out and get the listings
Sramana: What did you find to take feedback from him? Brian Requarth: He was just Brazilian. Sramana: That’s it? That’s the qualification, that he was Brazilian? Brian Requarth: The other qualification was that his family had a simple construction company. It had nothing to do with home-building, but I thought he perhaps knows something about real estate market.