Self-Financing an Artificial Intelligence Software Company: John Rauscher, CEO of Yseop (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You got your first customer in 2007. How much money did you put into this?

John Rauscher: A few millions.

Sramana Mitra: Right at the beginning, you put a few millions in the company, right away?

John Rauscher: No, not right away. We stopped looking for customers when we understood that people didn’t want to buy the product without development tools. I was not working there. I was at Oracle. We stepped back and built what people want—development configuration environment. We didn’t have a salesperson. We got sales by chance or through contacts without really looking. We really started looking for customers in 2009.

Sramana Mitra: In 2009, you built the development tools so you could give the customers what they were asking for?

John Rauscher: We started the configuration tool in July 2007. The first version was ready in the summer of 2009. We started to rush to customer sites. We got a few customers—telco and finance companies. They’re still using the product, but everything is on customer server. It was a requirement of those customers. They needed tools that can be installed in their servers.

Sramana Mitra: In that period when you were doing just product development, how many people were in the company?

John Rauscher: We were about 10 or 15.

Sramana Mitra: You were based in Paris?

John Rauscher: We were based in Paris and Lyon.

Sramana Mitra: That must have cost some money to sustain that operation.

John Rauscher: Absolutely. It was a big project compared to the previous ones where we have very nice tools but were not changing the world the way this software can do. In the summer of 2012, we decided to move the company to the US. That was the starting point. We said, “The big market is the US market. This is where we need to go.”

Sramana Mitra: In 2009, you had the product ready. Were there customers that you had talked to who were ready at that point to buy the product once it was available?

John Rauscher: Yes. At the same time, people would say, “Come back when it’s ready.” People were sceptical. They would say, “It looks fantastic but we have doubts on whether it’s appropriate for our people. We doubt the value.” We needed to evangelize a lot. I came back to people I knew and said, “I’m ready. How can we move forward?” I have seen people putting a lot of money saying, “We are going to build a team just to evaluate and do a pilot with your technology because we see the potential impact.”

Those customers are still our customers in Europe. One of them is a telco company. They have 500 service operators managing calls all day long and Yseop is helping them qualify the customer and provide the right answers. It is very reliable. Call centers on their own, on a testing environment, modify the business rule. They receive email from headquarters asking them to make some changes. They make the transition and then they push it into production when it’s validated.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Self-Financing an Artificial Intelligence Software Company: John Rauscher, CEO of Yseop
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