Bootstrapping Using Services from Montreal, Canada: Silanis CEO Tommy Petrogiannis (Part 2)

Sramana: You started up a company with some friends around 1992 where you did consulting around pen-based computing. Is that the same company you have today?

Tommy Petrogiannis: Yes, it is. We took the original outcome of that first consulting engagement and realized it was an opportunity that we could build a business off of. Once we delivered it to them as a custom solution, we realized there was likely others who would need something similar.

Sramana: It sounds like you did contract work to get the first generation of the company going, right?

Tommy Petrogiannis: Absolutely. Back then, seed money or venture money for a software company was very rare. You had to do everything the old fashioned way. You had to bootstrap to pay the bills. We took that initial contract award and did that work in the evenings and over the weekends.

Once we delivered the product to our first client, we were able to rent a table top with Autodesk and we started showing what we were doing. People started to ask if they could buy it and if it was available. That is when we knew there was a market. We then decided to quit our day jobs and really kick off the business. We had a customer get us the seed money. From that point forward, we just reacted very quickly to feedback that we received so that we could get new customers.

Sramana: How long did the service business go on?

Tommy Petrogiannis: We moved immediately into a software product company. We did that within the year. We knew we wanted a software business. Our initial consulting contract gave us the seed money to get there.

Sramana: Can you talk in more depth about the contract and the product that came out of it?

Tommy Petrogiannis: What we were displacing was signed paper. As a consumer, you are forced to sign something because a regulatory body tells them that they have to disclose and capture consent. We really wanted to make paperless happen. We saw that opportunity in the pen-based computing world. The only reason paper was generated was to use it or to sign it, but it all originated electronically.

We were tackling the need to sign the paper physically. We wanted to let that process happen electronically so that the paper never needed to be printed. The business could then move at the speed of the computer system it was operating on instead of forcing the process to go offline. We actually achieved that process.

The PC was supposed to make a paperless office happen and it did not do that. The reason for that is that the technology that was required did not exist. If someone had to produce a document for a legal or audit issue, they always had to revert back to paper. Two parties had to sign a document and then walk away with their copies. We knew that if we could do that same process electronically, we would have a viable business.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services from Montreal, Canada: Silanis CEO Tommy Petrogiannis
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