Self-Financing an Artificial Intelligence Software Company: John Rauscher, CEO of Yseop (Part 1)

John has self-financed and scaled an interesting AI software company built on French technology, and would like to take it public. Very impressive execution!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

John Rauscher: I was born and raised in France. I did a few jobs as a student. Then, I became a Mathematics teacher. It was important for me to learn how to set goals and understand how language is important for human beings. That was the first step. I came to the US to study English and Marketing at Berkeley. I learned so much in my experience at California that I promised myself to come back and live in the US, and start my company as an entrepreneur.

At that time, I was an executive in a large company. I worked for a few very good and strong startups, so I have learned a lot from American companies about discipline and organization. In 1995, I fulfilled my promise to myself when I started Cyrano, which became public four years later. It was a very fast-growing company.

Sramana Mitra: What did it do?

John Rauscher: It was a suite of products to test the databases—to find queries that were slowing down a server. It was at that time of the client-server architecture. That was my first company.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get this company started? Did you bootstrap the company?

John Rauscher: I had no money. I was the guy who came up with the idea. Then we built a prototype. I didn’t have enough money and I needed to raise my family of three kids. I couldn’t afford not to take salary. I didn’t join the company for the first few years even though I was at the root of the innovation. I joined the company when there were already a few customers and when the business was growing.

Sramana Mitra: You had co-founded. This is a company where other co-founders took the full lead and you kept your job. You joined the company after the company started to get some traction.

John Rauscher Absolutely. That was Cyrano. We became public. I wrote my first book about international marketing describing every mistake I had done when starting the business to help my peers about issues that they may have when starting a new business in software industry. With the money I got from the IPO, I joined another company. I was not a co-founder. I joined a company that had a few customers and with products that I loved because it was excellent in bringing a lot of value. That tool was an ETL. I started as the COO. Then, I became the CEO of the company. Then, we sold the company to Oracle. We were fast-growing. The product’s name now is Oracle Data Integrator. It was a big success.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Self-Financing an Artificial Intelligence Software Company: John Rauscher, CEO of Yseop
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