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Building an App Platform Company from the Netherlands: Mendix CEO Derek Roos (Part 6)

Sramana: What other strategic decisions were made in the process of penetrating the US market?

Derek Roos: One of my priorities after moving to the States was to build out a senior, experienced, management team. Before we made the move it was me and my founding partners. We were young, first time executives and we felt that we needed to build a team to speed up the company. That would also free me up to focus on other things.

Over the past year and a half I have built out a strong executive team here in the US. Our VP of Global Sales is here as are our VPs of Global Marketing and Business Development. They have built out their own teams here. Globally we have about 130 people of which 30 are in the United States. We expect to double that number this year and we are hiring aggressively. That has been the biggest strategic decision we have made. >>>

Building an App Platform Company from the Netherlands: Mendix CEO Derek Roos (Part 5)

Sramana: What was your pricing model prior to the shift into SaaS? How did you adjust that model when you moved into SaaS?

Derek Roos: Prior to our SaaS model, we sold perpetual licenses for the use of our platform. The price would depend on the number of applications that would be deployed on the Mendix platform and the number of users those applications had. That model has not really changed. The only difference is that instead of selling a license up front along with an associated annual maintenance contract we now charge annual subscription fees.

Sramana: What was your price comparison before and after?

Derek Roos: The SaaS price is roughly a third of the three-year perpetual software license model price, which means license plus maintenance. >>>

Building an App Platform Company from the Netherlands: Mendix CEO Derek Roos (Part 4)

Sramana: How many VC funds were operating in Amsterdam? Did you know them well?

Derek Roos: There are very little options in the Netherlands. There are a lot of angel investors but we were looking for an institutional investor and there are a handful of institutional investors there. There are maybe 10 at most. It is a small market and quite limited because of the size of the market.

Sramana: What happened after you raised money in early 2007?

Derek Roos: We raised 750,000 dollars. At that time we had a million dollars of revenue. With the money we raised we were able to expand the product team. Initially we were very focused on bringing the product to market and building the first versions of that product. We learned a lot in that early phase that, with all of our lessons learned, we realized that we would have made different design decisions. >>>

Building an App Platform Company from the Netherlands: Mendix CEO Derek Roos (Part 3)

Sramana: Let’s talk about the rest of your team. You were in business school, but you had technical co-founders. How did this team come together?

Derek Roos: At the company that I was working for while I was going to business school, there was another individual there who became my co-founder. He had a technical background. The three of us started Mendix together. What really made that core team so strong was that we had a shared vision for the platform and the problem we were solving, but maybe even more important, it was a shared belief and a mission to build a company that would be able to attract, retain, and develop the brightest minds we could find. Even today that drives our success. We want to have a team that is changing the world. Technology changes, and we have seen many changes in the last eight years. What has remained consistent are the vision and drive of our team. >>>

Building an App Platform Company from the Netherlands: Mendix CEO Derek Roos (Part 2)

Sramana: What specifically do you mean when you say application development? Are you talking about web applications or mobile applications?

Derek Roos: Both, actually. When we say applications, we are talking about business applications. The Mendix app platform means web and mobile at the same time. Our vision for applications is that it should not matter how the application is accessed, be it via a phone, tablet or web browser. It should work on any device and it should be tailored to the specific device. >>>

Building an App Platform Company from the Netherlands: Mendix CEO Derek Roos (Part 1)

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Derek Roos is the CEO if Mendix, an enterprise app platform company looking to bridge the gap between business and IT, making business application development dramatically easier, faster and collaborative. Derek earned a master of science degree in business administration from Erasmus University, Rotterdam. He is a highly sought speaker at IT conferences and is guest lecturer at several universities. Derek has received the Ernst & Young Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year 2012 Award.

Sramana: Derek, let’s start by reviewing your background. Where do you come from? What are the roots of your entrepreneurial journey?

Derek Roos: I am originally from the Netherlands. I was studying at the business school in Rotterdam when I came up with the idea of Mendix. I founded the company in the Netherlands with the idea of helping our customers dramatically cut down the development time of new business applications. >>>

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry (Part 7)

Sramana: What was the premise behind Zscaler?

Jay Chaudhry: We wanted to offer web security in the cloud. We also recognized that the world would be increasingly mobile. We also needed to do integration of point products. We did not need one for URL filtering, one for caching, one for antivirus, and one for DLP.

It was a very difficult task, but I hired a very smart team from a company called NetScaler. They had done a very scalable load balancers. We needed that expertise to develop such a scalable proxy. We had 50 people in our engineering team in a matter of months. >>>

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry (Part 6)

Sramana: At some point you did sell your first company to Verisign. What came next?

Jay Chaudhry: I stayed with Verisign for a while. I left in late 1999 after 18 months, although my obligation was only 12 months. I was ready to do more startups. I was driven by a few things. First, I was ready for a bigger challenge. Second, it was great to see my employees become financially independent. Third, I wanted to validate that I could build businesses systematically. My biggest asset is that I have no attachment to money. I think you make better, more balanced decisions that way.

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