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Bootstrapping Using Services: Robin Wiener, CEO of Get Real Health (Part 1)

Robin has built an excellent company with large, international clients in the healthcare domain and has used the bootstrapping using services technique that we espouse in 1Mby1M.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Robin Wiener: I’m from Connecticut. I was born in Bristol, the home of ESPN. I went to the University of Connecticut for college. Early on, I had a major speech problem. I couldn’t really pronounce things. Along with that, I had a major learning disability. I had two sisters and a brother. The teachers told my parents that I just wasn’t as smart as my brothers and sisters. Maybe I could get married and that would be a good thing for me to do. >>>

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 >>>

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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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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