Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after that?

Phil Copeland: There were a lot of lessons learned out of that. First of all, the original business was self-funded and was grown out of cash flow. Spot On was my first venture capital-based business, and it was also started in San Francisco. That was a really interesting experience. After that, I returned with my family to Sydney and once again, spent a bit of time wanting to start another technology business. I wanted one that was self-funded because after the dot-com boom, it was much harder to raise capital. Frankly, I was looking for a new idea for business that we could self-fund. It needed to earn money pretty much from the outset.

I spent a lot of time in 2002 looking around what were the new and emerging technologies within the enterprise and businesses that were significant. Looking back, I was looking for what was the equivalent of the client server revolution that was going to revolutionize how business was done. At that time, the area that we got really interested in was business process management (BPM) solutions, which were ways to automate the processing of business processes. To start with, I had a partner who co-founded Avoka with me. We found a company here in the US by the name of Q-link that had a fantastic BPM platform. It was funded by Draper Fisher. They were still quite a small organization but they just had, what we thought, fantastic technology. We became their first and only business partner anywhere in the world. Very quickly, we were able to sell that platform to several organizations within Australia including Boeing, a government department, and we also helped a bank build a mortgage processing solution.

By actually working with customers, we got some great insights into some of the problems and challenges they were facing in running their business. This is a really valuable lesson. Actually working with customers exposes you to fantastic insights to their real world business problems. That’s where a lot of really great ideas come from. What unfolded next was really quite interesting. Adobe wound up acquiring the Q-Link BPM product and making it a core part of their Adobe Live Cycle platform. Live Cycle was a suite of products that Adobe owned that was focused on enterprise customers and specifically, the kind of core technology there was their PDF interactive forms.

There was a whole lot of technologies around creating and managing PDF documents. Of these, the most important one was their interactive forms technology, which was used extensively by government and financial services organizations specifically to enable customers or clients to sign up or enroll for their different types of products. We actually thought the marriage of that Adobe technology along the the Q-Link BPM platform would be a fantastic platform to build our business around. At that time, we didn’t have a particular notion of a product we wanted to build ourselves but we realized that we could build through services and consulting revenue. We could build quite a healthy business and while we were doing that, what we were really hoping is that we’d be able to uncover some very specific customer business problems that may enable us to start building out our own IP and build out our own suite of products.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland
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