Pioneering Real-time Computing: TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadivé (Part 4)

SM: What did you do after your meeting with the Goldman Sachs partners?

VR: I borrowed a Sun workstation. They wanted to get into the commercial sector and they were competing in the engineering workstation area as well. We were the guys who took Sun and put it all over Wall Street. That turned out to be an incredible application.

SM: What happened at the end of the presentation?

VR: They bought into my idea. They just wanted me to show them what I could do.

SM: They were essentially handing over the trading floor. Did they ever question your ability to deliver?

VR: No. We did it in steps. I did it first on the program trading side because that is where the trading was intense and the dollars were huge. They could spend a few million dollars on the solution because the payoff would be so huge. We did it in increments like that.

The place that bet their entire firm on me was Solomon Brothers. They wanted to put their entire firm on a digital architecture. They wanted to go away from video and have workstations. That was the deal that defined us and set us on our trajectory. We had to compete with goliaths like IBM.

SM: What year does that bring us up to?

VR: This was the late 1980s.

SM: Had you taken any outside financing?

VR: None. I was profitable from my first year on. That was part of the value system I defined. My customers paid for everything, and these were big contracts. The thing that defined us was the $25 million contract with Solomon. We had to win that.

We had a bake-off where we had to demonstrate our stuff with other people. Their head of IT called me, and our final test was for me to convince him over lunch that we could do this. It was not an easy thing. Even though our technology was better we only had eight people. He asked me why he should give me the deal, and I gave him a laundry list of reasons why our technology was better. He just kept blowing his cigar in my face. I finally said, “You’re right, none of those are good reasons. There is only one reason why you should do this, and it is that we have fire in our eyes. Go look at our people; we are the most passionate group of people you will ever meet!”

They gave us the contract and that established us as the gold standard. We ended up being the people who digitalized Wall Street. Our solution because a must-have. That spread globally through all the financial institutions. Reuters was still the big competitor because they controlled the entire financial information market. I was basically taking their information, putting it on my platform, and presenting it better than they could present it themselves.

SM: Did they become a partner?

VR: They just fought tooth and nail. They are a very strong company. If you go to any financial center anywhere in the world you will see Reuters trucks running up and down the streets. They control the data. I had to beat them at their own game, and that was tough. Imagine selling to an English bank. The guys on the board of the bank play golf with the guys that run Reuters, a 150-year-old British company. In the end we convinced them.

Eventually they put up the surrender flag. They called me up and asked me if I would sell the company. They just wanted to adopt the technology. The person who had loaned me the money to start the company had no desire to take it public. We ended up selling the company. The final anecdote is that the week after the deal was closed, they had an offsite at which I was the guest of honor. I was describing the technology and was talking about the bus which we called The Information Bus, or TIB. One of the Reuters guys stood up and said, “All these years we were told TIB stood for “That Indian Bastard”. That was sweet revenge because we ended up winning.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Pioneering Real-time Computing: TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadivé
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