Bootstrapping Using Services from Montreal, Canada: Silanis CEO Tommy Petrogiannis (Part 3)

Sramana: It sounds like you found a niche working on digital signatures to enable paperless workflows well before it became a standardized business practice.

Tommy Petrogiannis: A lot of what we developed is commonplace today. In 1994, we were the first company to embed signatures into a PDF document. Adobe did it six years later. Today that is common. The concept of signing a document so that the signature is part of the document, independent of the storage and transfer medium, is something that we brought to the industry.

The ease of use of paper is fantastic. The drawbacks are that it is slow to route and very difficult to mine data from it. If we can keep the simplicity and ease of use that comes with paper in the electronic space then we have something that scales rapidly because the user does not have to change their behavior. It is process improvement simply by removing the friction of paper.

Sramana: Was the workflow itself the shrink-wrapped product that you made out of this?

Tommy Petrogiannis: It evolved to that but initially when we started, we were supporting AutoCAD drawings. One of the challenges that we discovered along the way was that there was not a common file format within an organization. The only common format was paper. You don’t need special technology or a viewer to receive paper. It was the only common file format within an organization. Back then, all of the file formats were proprietary. AutoCAD, Word, PDF, Excel, and others had closed document file formats.

When we first started, we figured out how to reverse engineer the AutoCAD file formats so that we could embed our secure electronic signature information into the document. That allowed your signature to transfer with the document via email or USB. From there we learned that people had other file formats that they were interested in. They would have had change notices in Word. If we could not sign those document types then we did not have a solution that really impacted the market.

We spent the next four years really rounding out the market. We discovered how hard it was to deliver a complete solution to the market. In the electronic world, there was not common file format so we had to find the equivalent of one pen. You can pick up a ball point pen today and sign any paper no matter where it originated. We had to do that in the electronic space. We needed to enable people to electronically sign any document type. We spent a lot of time finding market segments where we could sell what we had. We looked at everything. We looked at the types of entrepreneurial and innovation awards that we could win because those awards came with a cash prize of $50,000 at times and that really helped feed R&D.

Our markets shifted along the way. Initially we went after the design and AutoCAD markets. We discovered that the marketplace was very fragmented and they had many different file formats. If you can’t sign in a native format, then it’s very hard to scale. For that reason, we moved our focus to ISO 9000 companies, which had a much broader market reach. As we built the solution, we could deliver into those markets. We had a desktop product by that point for desktop applications.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services from Montreal, Canada: Silanis CEO Tommy Petrogiannis
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