Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 1)

Continuing with our Bootstrapping Using Services theme, we bring you a story from London.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some back story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Ajay Patel: I was born in London about 42 years ago. I’ve lived here all my life. My origins are actually Indian. My father is from India and my mother was born in Fiji, but she’s of Indian descent.

Sramana Mitra: What about school? I imagine you went to school in London.

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Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Just to get the facts straight, you have a bunch of Fortune 50 companies starting to adopt the solution. You did the seed round yourself. What about the venture round? At what point in that adoption cycle did that venture round come in? I’m not talking about post-IPO. I’m talking about the pre-IPO venture round.

Louis Tetu: We did two because we were fairly capital intensive. When I look at the amounts invested today, it’s still low. We raised a total of $36 million. That was back in 2000 to 2001. We raised a $10 million in 2000 and $25.5 million in 2001 with Bain Capital. The fact is that because we were selling subscriptions, from a pure financial perspective, we were financing customers. In addition to that, we had to build a server infrastructure which was also, at that time, very capital intensive. It was a double whammy from a cash consumption perspective that required quite a bit of money. In 2001, the $25 million round of capital with a software firm that only did $2.8 million in trailing revenue was pretty significant.

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Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In the case of HP as the anchor tenant, were they paying you?

Louis Tetu: They were in exchange for significant development capacity and applications suited to their needs. Of course, we had the framework for that. As I said, we went to them with a concept of digital competence profile. That was a significant value proposition to large companies, which is evidenced by the fact that by 2004, Taleo had 40% of the Fortune 500 as customers. Those companies deal with a lot of people and did that in very antiquated ways just by reading résumés and writing job descriptions. We thought there was a better way to perform the match as well as manage that supply chain. There was quite a bit of science behind it.

Sramana Mitra: In that early phase when you got HP as your anchor tenant and got Taleo off the ground, did you also put in some seed capital or did you raise venture capital at that point?

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Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo (Part 2)

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 technology companies. When you’re 34 years old and you’re basically technically retired, there are not that many people to play with on Wednesday mornings. You realize that the DNA of entrepreneurship is something you enjoy. The world of investing, albeit interesting, does not have the same DNA as the world of entrepreneurship and building organizations. We soon wanted to get back in the game.

Sramana Mitra: What was your next step?

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Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo (Part 1)

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 born and raised, and in what kind of background?

Louis Tetu: I’m French-Canadian. I was born and raised in Quebec, Canada. I live there with my wife and three children and that is where we started several software companies, including Taleo and Coveo.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with a little more context. What did you do in terms of education?
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Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 7)

Harman Singh: I’m a fundamental believer that this is going to go a long way. No matter how much I have in the business, it’s the reputation that’s going to be there forever—not the exit. That was the gist of the whole thing. We are where we are and the investors are happy.

Sramana Mitra: You’re still maintaining the same logic in the business, right? You have this classroom product that test preps agencies around the world are using on a per educator basis. You’re selling this product using telesales from India. That’s the core of your business, correct?

Harman Singh: Correct. I’ll elaborate a bit more about that. We consider education service providers as a customer of ours. However, we want to broaden the definition from just education service providers. It could be community colleges or universities, but we don’t have K-12 right now. >>>

Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: These two competitors that are heavily venture funded, what are their names? What is the situation right now? Are they comparable in revenue numbers? What metrics are you tracking for them?

Steve Liu: Good question. I don’t know their revenue numbers. It’s an interesting time in this market right now. One of them is PatientKeeper, which was recently acquired by a healthcare system. I don’t know where they stand but I do know that when it comes to what we do, we would always win the deal only because that was our focus. They were doing many different things on top of what we do. I don’t think they’ve had as much customer growth over the past years. We just didn’t see as many press releases. I’m not sure there’s as much adoption of the product when they rolled out. The other one is a company called MedAptus. These two are great companies but for some reason, we just do a slightly better job.

Sramana Mitra: You executed better and you were focused. It’s a wonderful story. What do you want to do next? Is money a lever that you can push to accelerate growth? Do you want to push that lever? What is your game plan?
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Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How much were you charging?

Harman Singh: On an average, $250 per educator per year. In those days, it was about $150.

Sramana Mitra: It was a per educator pricing?

Harman Singh: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: When you worked the test prep academy, were they buying for multiple educators? What would a test prep academy deal look like?

Harman Singh: About three to five trainers.
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