Featured Videos

Bootstrapping to Inc. 500: Tallie CEO Chris Farrell (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In 2008, Concur was already public and quite a successful company. What did you think of the opportunity? Let’s get a bit granular because we do cover Concur very extensively. Recently, we did a story on Expensify as well. The expense reporting space has shown up on our blog from many different angles. So we have an audience that’s familiar with what you’re doing. Could you help us understand, specifically, what you would identify as the opportunity to build a new company in that space? Positioning, by the way, is a discipline that we teach and explore very extensively and very diligently. It would be interesting for us to learn how you position your products.

>>>

Building a Successful Social Media Business from Germany: Moviepilot CEO Tobias Bauckhage (Part 1)

This discussion contains an extensive review of film recommendation systems that would be extremely interesting for folks engaged in building Web 3.0 systems. All in all, the story is quite fascinating!

Sramana: Tobias, let’s start with the beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? What is the background that gave roots to your entrepreneurial journey?

Tobias Bauckhage: I was born and raised in Central Germany. I grew up in a town close to Hamburg where my father was a professor of mechanical engineering. I focused on Math and Physics in my late high school years. I also played a lot of role playing games when I was younger. At one time, I wanted to become a journalist. I wrote for many magazines including student and youth magazines. >>>

Building a Cloud-Based Property Management Platform, Ric Leutwyler, President of SkyTouch (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Your number one competitor is Oracle, based on what I just heard, because Oracle is moving all their stuff to the cloud. It’s reasonable to expect that you’re going to have Oracle as a major competitor because Oracle has a big emphasis over on-cloud technology.

Ric Leutwyler: Of course. There are a number of others as well that are playing in this area in trying to achieve what we’ve already achieved. I think it’s been very interesting to watch the space because you’ve people making inroads in very different ways. >>>

Bootstrapping to Inc. 500: Tallie CEO Chris Farrell (Part 1)

Chris and his co-founder bootstrapped Tallie to a high growth Inc. 500 company in four years. After that, the product had to be re-architected, and slowed down for a couple of years, before picking up again. Read how they have competed in a crowded marketplace and built a robust position.

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

>>>

Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Portugal: Paulo Rosado, CEO of OutSystems (Part 7)

Sramana: In the United States we are used to seeing VCs build a company in a 5 to 7 year window. You have had VCs for substantially longer than that timeframe. How do European VCs look at the time windows?

Paulo Rosado: We have so many strong relationships with gross equity VCs that at this point, if we decide to, we could basically replace the VCs that we have with new ones. The fact is that our VCs don’t want to leave because they see how big the opportunity is. We were very early in the market. If we had started in the United States, we probably would not have survived because we would have been too early. >>>

Building a Cloud-Based Property Management Platform, Ric Leutwyler, President of SkyTouch (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Does the team at SkyTouch have ownership? Are there options?

Ric Leutwyler: The compensation is a mixed bag. There is some level of ownership but there isn’t anything to own yet of SkyTouch because there isn’t a separate entity to have valuation in. Our plans to create that kind of equity opportunity for team members is still not something we focus on.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get into the business. What is the business of SkyTouch? What do you do?

>>>

Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Portugal: Paulo Rosado, CEO of OutSystems (Part 6)

Sramana: When you tried to sell the platform, what were the top use cases against which you were closing deals?

Paulo Rosado: Portals, dashboards, and mobile apps. Those were our primary use cases. We found that those had to be integrated together and 60% of them had to have mobile interfaces.

Sramana: Is there a particular domain where more of these problems are popping up?

Paulo Rosado: They are coming up everywhere. In insurance the core place is in claims processing and agent networks. However, if you look at what we are doing as systems engagement, you will find demand everywhere. We have a couple of secondary use cases as well, such as very large migration projects. There are a lot of old systems, which are technological dead and which the customer must change. We get a lot of interest from CIOs because over half of their IT budget spent is outside of their control. >>>

Building a Cloud-Based Property Management Platform, Ric Leutwyler, President of SkyTouch (Part 2)

Ric Leutwyler: That was about the time when Choice Hotels contacted me and said they wanted someone to come in who has experience in hospitality and technology and also has entrepreneurial interest. They thought I may be a fit for that and I remember walking out and texting my wife that this was a dream job. This is a startup that’s not a startup because what Choice Hotels was saying is, “We want to give you a platform we built over the last 10 years or so and rolled it out to 5,600 hotels. We want to give you the people that built it, implemented, and supported it. We want to give you ourselves as a customer at around $30 million a year and we want you to take this into the marketplace and sell it to everyone else in the industry so you create greater shareholder value for Choice’s shareholders.” >>>