From Czechoslovakia to Silicon Valley: Roman Stanek’s Journey to GoodData (Part 7)

Sramana: What has your revenue ramp rate looked like over the years?

Roman Stanek: In 2012 we were over $15 million in revenue. We also have a backlog for the next couple of years. We know we have $15 million waiting for us twice over.

Sramana: What is your marketing strategy?

Roman Stanek: We have a cloud OEM strategy where we still run the software ourselves. The data analytics is done on our servers with our UI. Usually there is some collaboration where we will design the best analytics capability, and we host it and provide it to our partners’ customers. In other cases we share that responsibility, or the customer does it entirely on their own. The domain knowledge is with the partner. We also do a lot of inbound marketing and traditional marketing. We do PR and some outbound marketing. Part of our marketing strategy is to work on partner lunches as well.

Sramana: What is your enterprise sales strategy?

Roman Stanek: It depends on the price range. When we sell a well-defined business solution, then we can use inside sales. That usually has a limit of $75,000. When we sell OEM deals, we use direct salespeople with a shorter sales cycle of around three months.

Sramana: Where are you located? Where is your engineering?

Roman Stanek: We have offices all over, with sales throughout the U.S. but most inside sales based in Silicon Valley. Our engineering is based in the Czech Republic, which includes my VP of engineering. We use a similar business model as the Israeli companies where sales and operations is in the U.S. and they reach back to Israel for the engineering.

Sramana: Since you know the Czech Republic, that seems to be an approach that makes sense without being overly disruptive.

Roman Stanek: It is still somewhat disruptive because of the time zone difference. I would prefer to have all of my engineers in one office on one floor in the same time zone. I do have some engineers here. Not having a shared time zone is a bit more difficult.

Sramana: Yes, but then again you don’t have to live with the Silicon Valley talent war.

Roman Stanek: That is true. There are some people who say you cannot do a startup across multiple time zones. I would not recommend it to everybody, but I do believe it is possible.

Sramana: Especially nowadays where people are working all over the world. What is the startup ecosystem in Prague?

Roman Stanek: Sun was bought by Oracle and now Oracle has 500 people in Prague. HP has a lot of people there. I would imagine there are more than 1,000 people in Prague who have worked for large IT companies. That is a good candidate to create entrepreneurship. I wish I could help more there, but I cannot do much more at this time in terms of raising the next generation of Czech entrepreneurs.

Sramana: I like your story, and I like that you started in a scrappy way in Prague. I look forward to watching your continued success.

This segment is part 7 in the series : From Czechoslovakia to Silicon Valley: Roman Stanek's Journey to GoodData
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