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Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Belgium: Felix Van de Maele, CEO of Collibra (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Why did your current VP of Sales join your company? What was it in your company or in what you told him that convinced him to join your company?

Felix Van de Maele: I think that’s a really good question. We were very early. We had no revenues. We had no customers. He thought strategically about the problem and the  shift. Ultimately, we ended doing something slightly different. He was adventurous enough to take a big risk. We consider him a co-founder today.

Sramana Mitra: When he came on board, was that still in the first year?

Felix Van de Maele: It was in December of 2009. >>>

Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Belgium: Felix Van de Maele, CEO of Collibra (Part 2)

,Sramana Mitra: How did you go about starting it?

Felix Van de Maele: I did my Master’s thesis in data integration, which is a well-known problem. I wrote a one-pager saying what I wanted to do. We wanted to raise a seed round and build the product. We were going to do $50 million in five years because that’s what you’re supposed to say. I gave that one-pager to my professor at the university. He said, “Fine. Go ahead.”

We started talking to the technology transfer office at the university which specializes in taking intellectual property and commercializing that. They have investment friends. We started talking to different people, worked the first version of the business plan, and wrote seven more versions. That whole trajectory took about a year. Ultimately, we incorporated in June 2008 and raised our seed round in August 2008. >>>

Bootstrapping, Pivoting, Gaining Liquidity, Scaling to Over $100 Million: MediaAlpha CEO Steve Yi (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Do you want to quickly summarize what you attempted in the last two startups?

Steve Yi: My first startup, which was in 2004, was a customizable search toolbar platform that any publisher or website can customize and distribute to their users. The second company was a travel advertising site. It was essentially just an affiliate marketing website focused on the travel space.

Sramana Mitra: The first one didn’t work because there was no monetization model?

Steve Yi: Actually, there was a monetization model. You can monetize it through a deal with Yahoo! or with Google. It didn’t work because we were squarely within the crosshairs of Google who wanted the toolbar market. It was a very important market for them. In terms of getting distribution of their toolbars, >>>

Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Belgium: Felix Van de Maele, CEO of Collibra (Part 1)

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

Many entrepreneurs are starting companies elsewhere and then coming to the US to scale. Collibra has scaled to $20 million. Learn how.

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

Felix Van de Maele: I’m from Belgium. I grew up in Ostend, which is a small town at the seaside. I started studying computer science in Brussels at the University of Brussels where I did a Master’s in Computer Science. That was for four years, which I thought was way too short. I really wanted to study abroad so I did another Master’s in Software Engineering where I studied in France for six months and studied for five months in Argentina. >>>

Getting to Three Thousand Customers in Legal: iManage CEO Neil Araujo (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What’s on the cards now?

Neil Araujo: We’re about 300 employees. We don’t disclose our top-line revenue as a private company so I’d rather stay away from that. First of all, there’s some extremely fascinating things that are happening in the tech space whether it’s in academic research or analytics and Big Data, or the ability to write truly transformative applications as well as how it can transform business models for our clients.

At the same time, the whole professional services space, particularly the law firms, is seeing a ton of change. There’s a lot of pressure on security. There’s a lot of pressure by the end users for tools that work more like the consumer tools that they are used to using at home. All of these things are driving change in enterprise software that’s probably unprecedented. It’s almost like we are in 1995 and writing a whole new generation of software. >>>

Bootstrapping, Pivoting, Gaining Liquidity, Scaling to Over $100 Million: MediaAlpha CEO Steve Yi (Part 1)

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

Fascinating story of MediaAlpha, beautifully told by Steve, relates how the team has navigated through various experiments to over $100 million in revenue.

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

Steve Yi: I was born in Seoul, Korea. When I was seven, my family immigrated to Minneapolis, which is where I consider myself to have grown up. I went to high school in a small town. I went to Harvard College and majored in East Asian Studies. I had no idea what I wanted to do afterwards. I gravitated towards professional services. I worked at a company called Mercer Management Consulting, which is my first introduction to the business world. I opened my first spreadsheet working in management consulting. >>>

Getting to Three Thousand Customers in Legal: iManage CEO Neil Araujo (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next major milestone?

Neil Araujo: From a personal standpoint, the year I started iManage in 1995, I also applied to the Kellogg Business School because I never thought iMange would get off the ground. I thought of going to business school and getting an MBA. As iManage picked up steam, I kept deferring my admission. After we went public, I ended up going to business school and then came back to the company in a non-technical role. I was in Marketing.

I made the switch to marketing. A few years after that, we got acquired by Interwoven which was a Silicon Valley-based company. Interwoven got acquired by Autonomy. At Autonomy, I moved into a General Management role. I was running the ECM business at Autonomy, which was iManage plus a bunch of other acquisitions of Autonomy. Then Autonomy got acquired by HP as everyone knows. Then we spun the business off from HP. >>>

Bootstrapping from Ukraine: BPMOnline CEO Katherine Kostereva (Part 7)

Katherine Kostereva: We do account-based marketing campaigns around those companies. As soon as we acquire the partner, we do onboarding processes. We invest in onboarding the partner and have them start developing the market. In some regions, we have unbelievable success. In South Africa, we have a partner who’s bringing several customers every month. Our direct sales force is doing nothing to get those customers. We just support our partner to do the job. That’s our channel number one.

To summarize, we do account-based marketing targeting system integrators. Those system integrators get into their existing customer base selling BPMOnline. The second vector is classical inbound marketing. We do lots of educational content. Every week on our website in the Insights sections, our prospects and >>>