Sramana: You own the company 100%. How do you incentivize your employees aside from salary? Do you have a private stock option plan? Arvind Agarwalla: We do not have a stock option plan, and that would not make sense because I really have no intention of exiting the company. Our sales team operates with an
Sramana: Have you lost clients to the companies that offer an SaaS model? Arvind Agarwalla: We have not lost any clients to the public cloud. We offer our clients a private cloud option. We allow our clients to determine what kind of security they want. They allow what branches they want to connect to the
Sramana: In the history of any company, a few key people become the legs on which the table stands. Who were those people for you, and how did you find them? Kolkata was not the hotbed of management talent. Arvind Agarwalla: If you look at a product company, research and development is one leg. Sales
Sramana: It sounds like your market started to mature by 1991. Arvind Agarwalla: It was getting mature by then. We had started advertising, we had strong word-of-mouth recommendations, and we had a good user base. People recognized us as a software company. Our customers felt we delivered very effective software, and our pricing was extremely
Sramana: How did you deal with the piracy situation? It was pretty bad in the 1980s and 1990s. Arvind Agarwalla: The first thing we decided to do was implement copy protection on our software. Of course a lock can be broken, but we had to copy protect it or we would not be able to
Sramana: When you first started the company, how did you get the product into the market? How did you build the product and acquire your first customers? Arvind Agarwalla: I set up the company at the end of 1987. My first colleague was a very good friend of mine and remains a close friend to
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Arvind Agarwalla is the founder and CEO of FACT Software. Arvind founded FACT after recognizing that in the mid-1990s computers were primarily sold to automate accounting practices, yet they did not have a standard software package to accomplish the accounting functions. Now FACT has been established
Sramana: Do you maintain blogs as use those as a strategy for promoting your writing? Bella Andre: I do not blog at all. I don’t think I am very good at it and I would rather spend the time interacting on Facebook. Jasinda Wilder: I don’t blog either. Sramana: Let’s talk about the publishing industry