Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: £50,000 is a high-touch sale.

Ajay Patel: It’s a high-touch sale. When I look at the customer lifetime value, that’s what’s actually impressive. We’ve compared sales. Who are the clients we’ve had in January 1, 2012? What do they make? What do the same clients make in January 2013? Our average cohort is 25%. The same clients spend on average 25% more with us by increased usage. That certainly helps the growth.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about your team. You said it was you and your co-founder Veenay. Then you hired a COO. What else have you done with the team since that time?

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Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Canada: Jory Lamb, CEO of VistaVu (Part 1)

Jory Lamb started as an entrepreneur as a 23-year old in rural Canada. Read his 18-year journey.

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

Jory Lamb: I grew up in Saskatchewan, Canada. I was also born there. My dad was a schoolteacher and my mom ran local food stores called Red Roosters. We used to own three Red Roosters, which would be the equivalent of 7-11 stores in the late 70s to the mid 80s. I went on to the University of Saskatchewan and graduated with a business degree.

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Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Anything that starts to validate and gets clients into a product is really a key milestone. In everything that we do, that milestone makes a humongous difference.

Ajay Patel: It was a turning point for us.

Sramana Mitra: In what year was that?

Ajay Patel: That was in 2006.

Sramana Mitra: At that time, what kind of services revenue were you doing?

Ajay Patel: I think our total revenue in those days was probably around £300,000.
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Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of projects were you taking on during that time?

Ajay Patel: Development projects.

Sramana Mitra: So it had nothing to do with the legal industry?

Ajay Patel: Not much, to be honest.

Sramana Mitra: You got whatever you got and you did whatever you could get.

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Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If I understand it correctly, you have not only the indexers and the crawlers but also connectors to different systems like Salesforce that then allows you to bring all that together in contact.

Louis Tetu: You’re right. Obviously, you understand technology really well.

Sramana Mitra: I’m a computer scientist from MIT.

Louis Tetu: So we have essentially three things. We have the broadest set of connectors on the planet. While a lot of people went for search within specific apps, we took the switch route. Content will be fragmented. IT is trying to integrate systems at 50 miles per hour but legacy dies at 20 miles per hour. Cloud proliferates at 100 miles per hour. It is creating an ecosystem and is no longer a system of records. Coveo, early on, was one of the only ones out there who said the connectivity is key. Security is another key element. We’re the only indexer >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Frank Bien, CEO of Looker (Part 5)

Frank Bien: Let’s go back to the HotelTonight example. There’s no way the data would have understood that there was a correlation between these two data metrics that they had identified. Those were two different business teams that independently built these views of their business. Then one them says, “ Let’s put this together and see what happens.” You see that time and time again. What we really believe is that the trick is going to curate this over really large data sets so that business people can actually get value out of it.

Sramana Mitra: So you’re saying that we’re in the domain of data analyst and data scientist. My interpretation also is it’s going to remain a bad domain for another several years. I think eventually we will see actions being taken in software without the data scientists needing to intervene. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 2)

Ajay Patel: The vision was to build our own deal room or file sharing application and then license that to the legal industry. We put in our savings, which amounted to $30,000 and started HighQ. To this day, it is still a bootstrapped company. Having no money meant no salary, but it also meant that you had to spend money on what you actually needed. What we needed was a development team. We went to India.

Thirteen years on, I have to say that was the best decision we made. Today, that team is almost 100 people. I feel that if we had started off with financing or had a lot of money behind us, we may have gone for UK. We couldn’t have scaled that dev team like we have done today. We just started with product development really.

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Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Our program is 100% based on this philosophy that you have to immerse yourself in customers and you have to understand the customer dynamics—why they buy, when they buy, and how they buy.

Louis Tetu: If you do that, you can use seed capital to get very quickly to a use case and some customer adoption. Then, you can leverage upon that to raise the next round. I’m not saying it’s easy, but I’m saying that’s the way to do it.

Sramana Mitra: No arguments whatsoever on that. Now that we have that point fleshed out, what else do you want to tell in the Taleo story? As you pointed out, we have done the story with Michael.

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