Genesis to Acquisition: Mike Morris, CEO of Topcoder (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What happens after that?

Mike Morris: I can’t be specific about revenue after this point. This is where it gets interesting. At this point, we were cash-flow conscious. We weren’t doing all the things that we needed to do to grow more rapidly. We needed outside capital at this point. We had a few failed rounds mostly because we couldn’t come to agreement on the terms. It was difficult to give up the control.

I didn’t necessarily agree with where we were so I left in 2011. I went to go work for Appirio. My plan was to go out and start >>>

Genesis to Acquisition: Mike Morris, CEO of Topcoder (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: At what point did you find a monetization model that was meaningful and that could carry the business?

Mike Morris: 2004 was when we found the monetization model.

Sramana Mitra: What was that model?

Mike Morris: The model was going to customers, finding custom software development projects that needed to be built, and then using the community to build them through competitions. >>>

Genesis to Acquisition: Mike Morris, CEO of Topcoder (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: By this time, you’re one year into the project. Did you figure out monetization already or was that still open?

Mike Morris: That was my job. I would say we probably started on that about halfway through the first year. My responsibility was to figure out how to build a software company on top of this community. I read every book on agile coding, waterfall, and all the different methodologies to manage developers and was trying to apply that to this completely remote group of people. >>>

Genesis to Acquisition: Mike Morris, CEO of Topcoder (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Was it bootstrapped? How did you get this off the ground?

Mike Morris: It was self-funded. The majority came from the Chairman Jack Hughes. He was the Founder and Chairman of Tallan. He had a lot of capital. There were other people, myself included, who invested in the early stages of Topcoder. To be honest with you, our business model was very inconclusive.

We, as technologists, knew that if we built this community fo the best developers out there, there would be a ton of value in that. If we had gone to a VC and explained our business model, we wouldn’t have gotten any funding. Today we >>>

Genesis to Acquisition: Mike Morris, CEO of Topcoder (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Where does that bring us up to, timeline-wise?

Mike Morris: That brings us up to 2001. That’s when the next major shift in my career happened. That was the time where we had gone through our first year after the acquisition. The economy wasn’t fantastic, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. I moved back to Boston and got married.

At that point, I was looking to do something else. I was done with consulting. It wasn’t as fun as it was when you’re in the high-growth mode. I was either going to grow and start a biotech company, and Boston was the right place to do that. I started >>>

Genesis to Acquisition: Mike Morris, CEO of Topcoder (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Mike founded Topcoder, then left and joined Appirio. Appirio acquired Topcoder. Wipro then acquired both Appirio and Topcoder. Very interesting storyline.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Mike Morris: I was born in a town outside of Boston and grew up in a fairly large family. I’m the youngest of seven and went to Catholic schools for the majority of my life. I went to Boston College High School and I continued on into Boston College. I played sports >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services to $40 Million: ActiveCampaign CEO Jason VandeBoom (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: This $20 million that you brought in, did you deploy it into operations or did the founders take liquidity from that investment?

Jason VandeBoom: It’s mostly just there for making the right decisions. We haven’t really deployed it. It was never our intent to push that to sales and marketing, which is the classic idea.

Sramana Mitra: But it wasn’t also deployed as buying some of the founder shares? >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services to $40 Million: ActiveCampaign CEO Jason VandeBoom (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the next inflection point?

Jason VandeBoom: Right as we were getting comfortable with SaaS, we were still very much similar to being a contact list management tool. We quickly realized that we don’t want to be an email marketing company. It didn’t follow any of our beliefs. It didn’t even follow a lot of the functionality in our product.

We were more about sending fewer messages at the right time and using intelligence to drive all that. There was a disconnect between branding ourselves as an email marketing company and what we truly thought we were. We decided to change again and >>>