Bootstrapping from London to $10 Million: Alexandre Wentzo, CEO of Casewise (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What do you want to do with the business going forward? What’s the thinking amongst the shareholders?

Alexandre Wentzo: Our business has always been focused around process. We want to be more specific and trained to address more specific needs. We’re trying to focus now on business of IT. Business of IT is very specific. I’m going to give you a few examples. A lot of our customers use our technology to try to rationalize the number of applications they use. They’re using our technology around that. We’ve been developing a methodology around that technology which we have tried in California. This customer generated around $12 million revenue for Casewise. >>>

Bootstrapping Lessons: FairWarning CEO Kurt Long (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How long did Open Network go on?

Kurt Long: Almost 10 years.

Sramana Mitra: What happened then?

Kurt Long: It was acquired by BMC.

Sramana Mitra: What year was that acquisition?

Kurt Long: I think it was 2004 or 2005.

Sramana Mitra: You did not raise outside capital?
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Bootstrapping from London to $10 Million: Alexandre Wentzo, CEO of Casewise (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How do you charge? What’s the business model?

Alexandre Wentzo: It’s per user. Roughly, we sell at an average of $250,000.

Sramana Mitra: So it’s large enterprise selling kind of business?

Alexandre Wentzo: That’s correct. Things have changed because 10 years ago, we used to sell a few licenses. It would be 5 to 10 users. Now, we have this social layer in our platform. We still have 10 to 20 that are using our product but the information is consumed thousands of users. We sell now by server license. >>>

Bootstrapping Lessons: FairWarning CEO Kurt Long (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: On this topic, I’d like to probe a little bit more. Let me give you some context. We have a very significant research and curriculum material on a methodology that you followed, which we call Bootstrapping Using Services. One of our Entrepreneur Journeys Series books actually covers this as well. Let’s double-click on this a bit. When you started doing Fortune 500 services work around security, tell us a bit more about what specifically did you do?

Kurt Long: It was actually an early version of web single sign-on for large corporations. Whether it’s an insurance company or a telecommunications company, they might have a collection of applications that they use to service their external customers. They don’t want those customers to have to sign in multiple times. They want the experience to be seamless through a portal. They want it to be seamless in terms of security model. >>>

Bootstrapping from London to $10 Million: Alexandre Wentzo, CEO of Casewise (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When you arrived, was the product already in place? Were they already selling?

Alexandre Wentzo: Yes. The product was only in English at that time. There was a need to put in place a sales team in Europe. We trained them on the product. We were a very small company. I had to translate the product and training guides. We started to work with a major business school in France to get some students from Marketing, mainly to help us improve the perception of the business. The culture difference between France and England is quite massive. One of the main competitors was a 300-people organization based in Paris.

Sramana Mitra: How did you navigate the market and sell the product in the beginning?
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Bootstrapping Lessons: FairWarning CEO Kurt Long (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about the conditions under which you started your first company. What was that company? What was going on around that led you to that and how did you get that going?

Kurt Long: I was very naive about being an entrepreneur. I was a really good software developer and had a lot of energy. I had a lot of ambition and very little knowledge. It was in 1994 when I saw the World Wide Web for the first time. Many took one look at the World Wide Web and said, “This is going to change the world profoundly.” With a great deal of naivete, I left the corporate world and started my own business. >>>

Bootstrapping from London to $10 Million: Alexandre Wentzo, CEO of Casewise (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you tell the story of how the company was founded and develop the story fully?

Alexandre Wentzo: When I joined them in the UK, they were working in Central London in a small flat. They were keen on the French market at that time because the economy was a bit better than the rest of Europe. I used to travel back and forth between London and Paris. In 2006, we built the French office. Soon, we got big names in France as our customers. I went back to England for a few years and copied the French model I’ve developed. Two years ago, I went to the US and appled the same methodology. The story would be more on leadership than entrepreneurship, I would say.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a little bit about the business of Casewise.
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Bootstrapping from London to $10 Million: Alexandre Wentzo, CEO of Casewise (Part 1)

Alex tells the story of a bootstrapped company from London that has gone all the way to $10 million in just over 10 years and is now looking to scale further, perhaps with outside capital.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Tell us where you’re from, where you were born, raised, and in what kind of background.

Alexandre Wentzo: I was born outside of Paris in a little suburb. I come from a low social background. I would say that when I was around 13 years old, I started to set up my business. I used to check out every shop around my place. I started to offer brochures and create any marketing collaterals they needed and offered the complete package, from the design to the printing.

Sramana Mitra: Where was this? >>>