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Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How do you position against a Huddle? We’ve done the Huddle story for instance. SharePoint is a well-known product. Tell me how you position against each of them. The reason I ask you is because we try to give our readers a lot of exposure on positioning. If you could help us think through how you are doing your positioning, that is something that I want my readers to understand and learn from.

Ajay Patel: On day one, we said we’re going to target the legal market. Indirectly, what that meant was we’re going to have to build the most intense security you can think of. Security has always been at the heart of everything we do. >>>

Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Canada: Jory Lamb, CEO of VistaVu (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In 1996, you decided that you were going to do something with technology and you were going to work in rural Canada. You were going to get these farmers online and you wanted to teach them how to use computers and so forth. Is that right?

Jory Lamb: Yes. It just makes me smile now. Here is a 23-year-old kid. I had never managed any people. Never really started a business and didn’t take any computer course in a university. I had no money, clients, and no contacts in this market. As a 41-year old looking back at a 23-year-old, there’s no way that 23-year-old would ever convince me to invest in his business. It was a bad idea going out of the gate. It really was. It was sheer ignorance and perseverance that allowed me to actually build this business to a pretty good size.

Sramana Mitra: Why did you choose rural farmers in Canada? Some dot must have connected. A light bulb must have gone off in your head. Do you remember what that was?

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Bootstrapping Using Services: Robin Wiener, CEO of Get Real Health (Part 3)

Robin Wiener: We were lucky enough to do a project. I had gone out and recruited a company that wanted to do wellness. We built a wellness platform for them.

Sramana Mitra: You were basically doing contract software work at this point. Out of those three desks at the incubator, you were taking projects and building software for people.

Robin Wiener: Exactly. One of the software we built was for a wellness company. Microsoft approached them and said, “We’re starting this brand new platform called HealthVault.” >>>

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: Robin Wiener, CEO of Get Real Health (Part 2)

Robin Wiener: I think the one thing about being an entrepreneur is that you always try to find what you like to do and see if you can make a career out of it. That’s what happened with recruiting for me. I found something I was passionate about and started following that. That took me to the IT world. All of a sudden, I’m recruiting for developers, project managers, and solution architects. With that, I’m learning about how technology can change people’s lives and what you can do with it.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you start this business?

Robin Wiener: I was the HR Director for USWeb from 1997 to 1999. >>>

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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Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: There are a lot more hubs that have developed where interesting companies are built. You probably know Greg Gianforte who had built up a very interesting unorthodox place like Montana into a very nice technology destination.

Louis Tetu: Technology is ubiquitous. Regardless of where we are, we all have the challenge of distributed teams. At Taleo, we have 500 employees in the East Bay. It wasn’t easy to recruit them nor was it easy to keep them.

Sramana Mitra: It’s absolutely incredibly difficult to recruit right now.

Louis Tetu: Of the core team that moved over in 2005 from Copernic, 5% churned and 95% is still there. That’s critical because the aggregated knowledge is kept intact. That’s really important.

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