Building An Enterprise Software Company From Europe: President Of Neolane North America, Stephan Dietrich (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The three of you worked together and sold your first software company. When was that?

Stephan Dietrich: That software company was acquired in 1995. There are ups and downs to creating a company like that. We started it in late 1992 and sold it in 1995, but it was not a straight line.

Sramana Mitra: Did the three of you get a good exit from that company? How much revenue were you doing when you sold the company, and how much did you sell it for?

Stephan Dietrich: We did not make enough revenues to get anything substantial. We were young and made some mistakes there. The company was acquired by Peregrine Systems and at that time, in 1996, the company was quite small. We could have made tons of money with the bubble and the startup wave that came later. We made enough money to be happy, but we did not hit the home run yet.

Sramana Mitra: Did you have to go work for Peregrine Systems?

Stephan Dietrich: No, I never went to work for Peregrine Systems. I never felt the attraction of being in a much larger company. I took one of the projects that we had around big data and started another company called Cubicsoft. We were in the same building and we were still spending a lot of time together. I was just not super comfortable with the Peregrine Systems story, so I decided to start a company on big data instead. I was working on defense projects for the French government. I knew that this would be an incubator or a lab for the next big project together. I just asked my friends to give me a couple of years before I could come up with the next big project.

I built a team of nothing but engineers. We were experimenting in a lot of areas. We created a profitable business based on an ad-hoc software development service. It was while running that company that in 1998 I recognized a new need emerging in the sales and marketing lines of business within enterprise software. We were just selling to the IT lines of business. I was fascinated with marketing. I loved it, and I did it at the previous company. I looked at B2B and B2C trends. It was just a passion.

In 1999 and 2000 I realized there was a need for marketing automation. It means enterprise marketing technology. It was marketing technology for a line of business that was pretty much void of that technology. The financial people had enterprise resource planning (ERP) and their reporting systems. The production and manufacturing people had supply chain management systems. HR had their HR systems. All the lines of business had strong IT software systems to help them do their jobs every day, but there was nothing in marketing. In sales, offerings were also very basic.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building An Enterprise Software Company From Europe: President Of Neolane North America, Stephan Dietrich
1 2 3 4 5 6 7