Self-Financing an Artificial Intelligence Software Company: John Rauscher, CEO of Yseop (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What role did you play in this company? There were other people who co-founded the company and you came in later?

John Rauscher: Yes, I came in as the COO. Then, I became the CEO of the company.

Sramana Mitra: When the company was sold to Oracle, you were running the company?

John Rauscher: Yes, I was running the company. I negotiated the deal with Oracle as the CEO of the company. It was a six-month process. It was a good experience. I didn’t regret it even though I wasn’t a major stockholder. The decision to approve the transaction with Oracle came from the board. I was a stockholder of the company but not a major stockholder.

I took my money and I co-founded Yseop. It was more an invention rather than innovation. I partnered with Alain Kaeser who has led the team for more than a decade to create Yseop’s source code. We wanted to develop a software that articulates the reasoning and writes like a human being. We also wanted it to be easy to use. We wanted to develop artificial intelligence applications with a graphical interface that is as easy to use as Excel. It has been very successful because the product is very unique and customers can develop applications on their own. The company is growing. I put the money in July 2007. Then I joined the company as a CEO in 2009.

Sramana Mitra: What happened between 2007 and 2009 in terms of validating the opportunity? What did you and Alan do to validate the opportunity at that time?

John Rauscher: I was VP at Oracle. I oversaw the transition. There was no graphical interface to configure the artificial intelligence engine. What we did between 2007 and 2009 is build the first version of the graphical interface, which was based on Eclipse.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of product were you providing interfaces to? Who were your customers?

John Rauscher: Our customers were, from day one, very large customers who were trying to write personalized reports to help sales people. Our first project was to give sales people a tool that helps them understand CRM data. Those were our first customers. CRM is great but when you have hundreds of data, the sales person cannot immediately understand it. Yseop was applying business tool on the data and turn the CRM data into recommendations. The customer said, “We need a tool to be able to do it on our own and to be able to maintain our application.” Alain’s vision was, “I want to do artificial intelligence but what I have learned from the ’80s is that people want artificial intelligence that is not rocket science. They want artificial intelligence that they can use and get a return on investment immediately.”

This segment is part 2 in the series : Self-Financing an Artificial Intelligence Software Company: John Rauscher, CEO of Yseop
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