Celebrating MIT’s 150th Anniversary: Alumni Ian Clemens, Founder Of IDV Solutions (Part 3)

Sramana: At that point did you start selling visualization software as a product?

Ian Clemens: We do a lot of that now at IDV Solutions. We are definitely a software solutions company. However, we did not sell any products like that at the consulting firm. After I left the consulting firm I went to another company that was more of a traditional paper mapping company. I ran a business technologies division there and we began selling software at that point, although it was not related to what I am doing now. It was based on an open source technology stack. That actually hurt us in many ways at that time. In 2004, a business partner and I formed IDV Solutions and we decided to go to a Microsoft technologies stack of software. That turned out to be a good move for us.

Sramana: How did you execute the exit between the company you were working for and starting IDV Solutions?

Ian Clemens: There were a couple of transactions that occurred. The business unit I was in at the consulting company was sold to the mapping company. I went over as part of that deal along with my team. Ultimately the mapping company decided not to pursue what we were doing any further due to other issues in the paper mapping business. We started over with new IP. We moved to a different methodology and technology approach.

Sramana: When you were starting new with another partner, what was your mechanism for funding the new company?

Ian Clemens: IDV was self-funded by Mark and me in January 2004. We funded it from equity lines, and we took on personal debt.

Sramana: How much debt did you have to expose yourselves to?

Ian Clemens: It fluctuated; at its peak I would say half a million dollars.

Sramana: What was the next step in terms of building products and getting to market? What was your strategy for building this business?

Ian Clemens: Initially we were selling the idea. We built some prototypes of the visualization platform. We went out to Fortune 500 companies. From the very beginning we targeted the largest organizations we could find because we knew they had lots of data and not a lot of good ways to derive insights from that data.

Sramana: What part of the Fortune 500 businesses did you go after?

Ian Clemens: We were very general in our approach. We initially called on folks in the business intelligence departments, which turned out to be a mistake. We then went after contacts we had and worked our way to business people within the organizations who had a lot of data and needed a way to view it. A big premise of our company is that visualization should not be a technical function. It should be done by an average business person, even a CEO, that uses our products. That is part of why going to the business intelligence folks was a mistake. They were scientists with a lot of overhead costs. They did not have budgets for doing new things. When we started going to business people, that is when we started seeing success.

Initially we sold a service-heavy model. We showed the prototypes that we had built with made up data. We tried to tailor demonstrations to the customer and then propose building them a system based on our expertise. At first there was not a licensing model to what we were doing.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Celebrating MIT's 150th Anniversary: Alumni Ian Clemens, Founder Of IDV Solutions
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