Serial Bootstrapper: Oversee and Manage Founder Fred Hsu (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What do you want to do? You’ve had one successful exit. You’re in a financially comfortable position. You’ve built a second company that is also bootstrapped and very profitable. You’re still fairly young. What do you want to do with your business? How are you thinking about your choices and options now?

Fred Hsu: For me, it’s all about people. From a business perspective, I want to make sure my founders and the employees who stuck around see similar success to what I’ve seen in the past and also take enough knowledge from what they’ve learned here to their next startup. On a personal side, I have two children. They’re three and five. I want them to see daddy work. I don’t play golf. I’m not going to be home in my bunny slippers. I don’t even have slippers. Probably work, life normalcy, and high aspirations for my co-founders, employees, and my kids.

Sramana Mitra: Do you want to continue running this company and growing this to a much larger scale? Or do you want to exit this company and start another one?

Fred Hsu: I want to build Manage to the biggest company it could possibly be. If I could see it publicly traded five years from now, that to me would be success.

Sramana Mitra: You will either do that in a self-financed mode or perhaps you want to raise money, but you want to build this company out and take it public?

Fred Hsu: Correct. Even when it comes to raising money, I want to do what I did at Oversee, which was raise money when I least need it.

Sramana Mitra: At this point given the level of revenues you’re doing, the entire negotiation is in your favor. There are investors who are going to be falling all over themselves to fund you.

Fred Hsu: I’d like to think so. I will say that we have chosen an industry with a lot of competition. We are currently in the midst of a transition to more of a software company rather than a month-to-month advertising company.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about that. What does that entail?

Fred Hsu: What that’ll mean is basically sacrificing short-term revenue opportunities and reinvesting a lot of our profits into building a more differentiated business model. With all industries, we did see competition and they nipped at our heels. It’s up to us to find our way out of it.

As an example, there are probably three or four short-term revenue deals that we could be chasing today. Our competitors will focus on those. They’ll be flying around, wining and dining away from office, while we’re interested in sitting with our existing customers and to really ask them what they think they need next and build something where we think the industry’s going. I tell people, “Instead of $100 million a year, I’d rather be doing $30 million a year on annual subscription.”

Sramana Mitra: You want to go from an advertising business to a SaaS business?

Fred Hsu: Yes. We see these companies in the news. The demand side platform type of business model is one that’s not as sustainable as we would like.

Sramana Mitra: What is your vision for the SaaS product? Do you have a concrete thought?

Fred Hsu: Some of it is still under wraps. We have a data platform that fundamentally manages all our data management. Our company tagline is, “Where data unlocks opportunity.” What we’ve been doing so far with the programmatic buying is really just an app that sits on top of our data platform. Our buying platform can only be as good as the information it receives to make real-time decisions. If the data sucks, there’s no buying activity. What we’ll be doing is extending our data platform to offer more software products around user growth and retention to gaming and retail companies alike within mobile. We have two or three products in the pipeline.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Congratulations. You’ve navigated very well.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Serial Bootstrapper: Oversee and Manage Founder Fred Hsu
1 2 3 4 5 6 7