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Bootstrapping a Language Product Company Using Services from London, Then Taking it Public and Scaling It to $450M: SDL CEO Mark Lancaster (Part 3)

Sramana: Can you give us an example of the types of products that would be labeled as language technology products?

Mark Lancaster: There are a lot of products that fit in this space. We started out by building products that would make translators more productive as they translate. We have gone on to create many more enterprise translation technologies.

Sramana: What does it entail to take a software package and convert it into a different language? Aside from pure natural language translation, what other nuances and intricacies are involved?

Mark Lancaster: It’s a very big topic. What people like to think about is automatic translation. That is machine translation and we have been investing in that technology for about 15 years. That is a very specialized area. There are three companies in the world that have the best scientists working in this space: ourselves, Google, and Microsoft. We all invest in statistics machine translation. We own FreeTranslation.com, for example, but we don’t make money from that. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ulf Zetterberg, CEO of Seal Software (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s put this in an ecosystem map. The contract management part of the business has quite a bit of activity. One that comes to mind is Aptus.

Ulf Zetterberg: They ride on the wave of Salesforce. Contracting has typically been driven by different departments. There hasn’t been any system for enterprise contract lifecycle management. Customers want to have one single system that they could use, but it never happens. Procurement tends to use its own system that is very much driven out of a supply or procurement system. You have contracting as a function there. Sales side usually is the back-end of the CRM system.

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Bootstrapping a Language Product Company Using Services from London, Then Taking it Public and Scaling It to $450M: SDL CEO Mark Lancaster (Part 2)

Sramana: How did you get your first clients once you started this new company?

Mark Lancaster: Most of my contacts were at large companies. I knew people in Microsoft, Computer Associates, and a company called Contact Software in Dallas. I was lucky because I am not really a salesman. We got our first big contract from Contact Software in Dallas. We worked with them for many years. We also got a sizeable contract with Microsoft and we still work with them to this day. We really built the business from there. As the company got larger, we started moving from language services, which we did until 1996, into creating software to help businesses and the people in the language ecosystem. We created software that allowed them to be more effective. We essentially started building a language software business in 1996. >>>

Bootstrapping a Language Product Company Using Services from London, Then Taking it Public and Scaling It to $450M: SDL CEO Mark Lancaster (Part 1)

Very few technology companies have been built from the UK. ARM and Autonomy come to mind. Here’s the story of a lesser-known company called SDL.

Sramana: Mark, let’s start with the beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? What is the backstory of the SDL story?

Mark Lancaster: I was born and raised in the UK. I studied engineering and computer science at the university. I started my career as a software design engineer at Satchwell Control Systems and Lotus Development Company. Fairly early on, one of the biggest issues I saw at companies was the need for coders or programmers to engage effectively with management. >>>

Bootstrapping a Cloud Startup with Services on Force.com from London: Alex Fuller, Co-Founder and CTO of CloudSense (Part 7)

Alex Fuller: External investment has allowed us to increase our Sales & Marketing investment to reach more companies. Our R&D investment has allowed us to create more vertical specific features that further differentiate us from the competition. We have also established a US presence with people on the ground in a number of locations headquartered in New York. We have a very good win rate versus the competition and as such our communication strategy is to raise awareness to a wider audience with relevant messaging for their industry segment. >>>

Bootstrapping a Cloud Startup with Services on Force.com from London: Alex Fuller, Co-Founder and CTO of CloudSense (Part 6)

Sramana: What is your geographical scope in terms of the markets served?

Alex Fuller: In terms of product software license sales, our focus is led partly by our regional presence. The US, UK, and Europe are our primary areas. We are also engaged in Australia. Additionally, we have system integrators who have partnered with us all over the world.

Sramana: How has CloudSense ramped in terms of revenue?

Alex Fuller: We hit the million dollar mark quite early; I believe it was during our first year. We have had fast growth since. We had about $5 million in revenues at the two-year point. We are now approaching our five-year mark and have crossed $15 million dollars in revenue. We are now targeting high revenues. >>>

Bootstrapping a Cloud Startup with Services on Force.com from London: Alex Fuller, Co-Founder and CTO of CloudSense (Part 5)

Sramana: Did the AppExchange or Salesforce teams generate leads for you even if you had to do the selling?

Alex Fuller: We definitely had some leads coming off of the AppExchange. Our own direct selling efforts accounted for the vast majority of our leads and closed deals. I include the leg work of staying in front of the Salesforce sales teams in the region into that bucket. We kept meeting with them and explaining product capabilities so when they ran into a customer who had requirements that could be met by our product, they would be willing to refer them our way.

Sramana: Did you focus on selling in the UK or throughout Europe? >>>

Building A Profitable, Steady Growth Subscription Business: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Why do you need to filter the needs? From what you described, it sounds like the system is pretty self-correcting or self-converting?

David Barrett: It is. Most of our time is spent minimizing the number of times that you will need to reach out to us. For example, it’s possible that we can spend several hours dealing with a QuickBooks connection for some customer that will never pay us because this is just an individual person using QuickBooks. We want to make sure that we avoid getting trapped into spending a tremendous amount of time on people that will never pay us. We do all sorts of things like prioritize incoming messages that gives fast responses to people who are the biggest opportunities. It’s pretty self-optimizing. That’s why engineers are such a critical part of our model. Pretty much everything we do comes down to someone from engineering.

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