Serial Entrepreneur: Peng Ong (Part 1)

Here is an interview with Peng Ong, the first in a new Serial Entrepreneurial series. This series will highlight those entrepreneurs who have repeatedly been able to come up with innovative ideas for new ventures, been successful in their endeavors, and also failed, but most importantly, have taken in their stride a certain way of life that includes risk and experimentation. We focus, here, on not only the businesses which they have created but the processes they followed.

SM: Where did you start? What is your background?
PO: My dad was an entrepreneur, he sold books. My dad basically grew up pre war and during the war (WWII), so the economy was not all that great in Singapore and there were very few regular jobs. All the time I knew my dad, he made a living that way.

SM: So that was a core value system?
PO: A core value system … I think the most important thing is you can always put food on the table. He gave me the confidence that no matter how bad it got, if you just have your wits about you, you can always put food on the table. You can maintain your basic survival needs.

SM: So when did you come to the US? Was it for graduate school or undergrad?
PO: It was for my undergraduate school. I am longhorn – UT Austin. I did my EE there and then went off to Illinois (Champaign) to do my Masters. I was in the PhD program and took my qualifiers and decided that I did not really know why I was there, so I took off to see the real world.

SM: And what was it you saw in the real world?
PO: When I was in high school I thought I would become a doctor, and then I met my first computer and all of that changed. At the same time, around the late 70’s early 80’s, folks like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs started to make news. They started to inspire me… hey, geeks can be successful in business! I thought that was a great combination when Steve Jobs and Bill Gates came up with this business scheme. So I guess I was trying to figure out “How was this done?” I made it a point, instead of finishing up my education, to go and look at how things happen.

SM: And then when you were at the University of Illinois you quit your PhD program. By the way I quit my PhD program at MIT as well, so I completely understand.
PO: There is a good trend of dropouts!

SM: In our business, absolutely! So, what happened afterwards – you joined a startup you said?
PO: Yeah, it’s a company by the name of Gensym, when there were 20 folks, I joined as number 21 and as the second non-founding engineer (they had about 6 engineers). It was spun out of MIT’s A.I. lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I lived in the Boston area for about two and a half, almost three years. I realized that a lot of my friends, people in software and EE, ended up in the valley and I heard a lot about what was happening there, so I wanted to head out there.

SM: What year was this?
PO: I was in Cambridge until 1990. I left for Berkeley in 1990 and I joined Sybase. It was a startup then (a few hundred folks) and it was pre-IPO. Everything I had heard about Sybase as far as technology was A-1 at that point, if you remember database history. That is when I got into databases. Sybase was the biggest company I ever joined; by the time I left there were more than a thousand folks in the company – that was huge for me.

SM: How many years was that?
PO: Almost three years too. I joined one of Mike Stonebraker’s startups called Illustra.

SM: Illustra – you mean the object database company that Informix bought?
PO: Yes, we call that the first .com flip. We had very little revenues, and we sold it for $450M.

SM: Did you make money on that deal; enough to give you a launchpad to start something that you could fund yourself?
PO: Sybase went public when I was there, and with some of what I made at Illustra, I managed to start Interwoven later on.

SM: So, Interwoven was started with your own money which you made out of Sybase and Illustra?
PO: Yes, but my first startup was not. My first startup was with Gary Kremen, which was Electric Classifieds which produced Match.com. Sybase first, Illustra, then co-founded Match.com and then Interwoven.

[Part 5]
[Part 4]
[Part 3]
[Part 2]
[Part 1]

This segment is part 1 in the series : Serial Entrepreneur: Peng Ong
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