Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Belgium: Felix Van de Maele, CEO of Collibra (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Many entrepreneurs are starting companies elsewhere and then coming to the US to scale. Collibra has scaled to $20 million. Learn how.

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

Felix Van de Maele: I’m from Belgium. I grew up in Ostend, which is a small town at the seaside. I started studying computer science in Brussels at the University of Brussels where I did a Master’s in Computer Science. That was for four years, which I thought was way too short. I really wanted to study abroad so I did another Master’s in Software Engineering where I studied in France for six months and studied for five months in Argentina. >>>

Getting to Three Thousand Customers in Legal: iManage CEO Neil Araujo (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What’s on the cards now?

Neil Araujo: We’re about 300 employees. We don’t disclose our top-line revenue as a private company so I’d rather stay away from that. First of all, there’s some extremely fascinating things that are happening in the tech space whether it’s in academic research or analytics and Big Data, or the ability to write truly transformative applications as well as how it can transform business models for our clients.

At the same time, the whole professional services space, particularly the law firms, is seeing a ton of change. There’s a lot of pressure on security. There’s a lot of pressure by the end users for tools that work more like the consumer tools that they are used to using at home. All of these things are driving change in enterprise software that’s probably unprecedented. It’s almost like we are in 1995 and writing a whole new generation of software. >>>

Bootstrapping, Pivoting, Gaining Liquidity, Scaling to Over $100 Million: MediaAlpha CEO Steve Yi (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Fascinating story of MediaAlpha, beautifully told by Steve, relates how the team has navigated through various experiments to over $100 million in revenue.

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

Steve Yi: I was born in Seoul, Korea. When I was seven, my family immigrated to Minneapolis, which is where I consider myself to have grown up. I went to high school in a small town. I went to Harvard College and majored in East Asian Studies. I had no idea what I wanted to do afterwards. I gravitated towards professional services. I worked at a company called Mercer Management Consulting, which is my first introduction to the business world. I opened my first spreadsheet working in management consulting. >>>

Getting to Three Thousand Customers in Legal: iManage CEO Neil Araujo (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next major milestone?

Neil Araujo: From a personal standpoint, the year I started iManage in 1995, I also applied to the Kellogg Business School because I never thought iMange would get off the ground. I thought of going to business school and getting an MBA. As iManage picked up steam, I kept deferring my admission. After we went public, I ended up going to business school and then came back to the company in a non-technical role. I was in Marketing.

I made the switch to marketing. A few years after that, we got acquired by Interwoven which was a Silicon Valley-based company. Interwoven got acquired by Autonomy. At Autonomy, I moved into a General Management role. I was running the ECM business at Autonomy, which was iManage plus a bunch of other acquisitions of Autonomy. Then Autonomy got acquired by HP as everyone knows. Then we spun the business off from HP. >>>

Bootstrapping from Ukraine: BPMOnline CEO Katherine Kostereva (Part 7)

Katherine Kostereva: We do account-based marketing campaigns around those companies. As soon as we acquire the partner, we do onboarding processes. We invest in onboarding the partner and have them start developing the market. In some regions, we have unbelievable success. In South Africa, we have a partner who’s bringing several customers every month. Our direct sales force is doing nothing to get those customers. We just support our partner to do the job. That’s our channel number one.

To summarize, we do account-based marketing targeting system integrators. Those system integrators get into their existing customer base selling BPMOnline. The second vector is classical inbound marketing. We do lots of educational content. Every week on our website in the Insights sections, our prospects and >>>

Getting to Three Thousand Customers in Legal: iManage CEO Neil Araujo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much did the first customers pay you to buy this software?

Neil Araujo: What mattered for us at that point was that somebody was using it. They did pay us. It took two years. The second customer was more painful because it took six months. The story over there is you have to be patient with these things. You have to persevere.

Sramana Mitra: You have to pursue. You have to be patient but you also have to survive, which is why how much people pay is really important. Otherwise, you could go out of business.

Neil Araujo: That’s why, at that stage, watching our expense structure is really important. You never know how long that will take. What you can control is the expense structure. Being an immigrant and not knowing any better, you’re naturally attuned to that. We got our second customer in New York. After that, >>>

Bootstrapping from Ukraine: BPMOnline CEO Katherine Kostereva (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about organic growth versus financing. Is all the growth that you’ve achieved so far organic?

Katherine Kostereva: It’s all organic. We never took loans and we never had investors. The approach is very simple. We reinvest everything we earn into our business. Nowadays, we have 700 people on board in six offices globally. You can roughly split those 700 people into two parts. One half is R&D and technical support. The other half is marketing and sales.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of this is in Ukraine?

Katherine Kostereva: R&D is almost 100% in Ukraine. We have several people in different locations to support our customers. It’s split for sales and marketing. For example, I work in our Boston office because I’m leading the expansion into the American market. We are heavily investing in our Australian >>>

Bootstrapping with Affiliate Marketing: Zeeto CEO Stephan Goss (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happened in 2012?

Stephan Goss: We started hiring pretty extensively on the tech side. I think, by the end of 2012, we got up to about 12 people. The questions were just statically built. They weren’t optimized. There wasn’t anything about switching them around. We started hiring a lot of developers around that concept. We started building a platform that would basically power it all dynamically.

We built the full ad exchange to optimize which of the buyers were bidding on the inventory. That was the year in which we heavily invested in tech. We ended up getting up to about a $12 million run rate. We started to get a lot bigger and had to finance the hire of some more experienced people. Just having better technology ended up paying off significantly. >>>