Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Did it give you a sense of how much they were willing to buy it for if you built it?

Dave Terry: Absolutely. We established the price and had agreement on everything.

Sramana Mitra: What was that price that they agreed to buy it at?

Dave Terry: We probably shouldn’t get into those details specifically. Let’s just say it’s at our normal list pricing structure. All our customers pay based on the volume. Depending on the amount of transactions that the customer processes, obviously, there is volume discounting. This is in the orders of $10,000 to $20,000 a month.

Sramana Mitra: You had that level of validation from these three law firms. You recruited a CTO using a recruiter. Did you have to pay a salary to the CTO or did you get him on equity?

Dave Terry: It was a combination. We did give him some amount of equity.

Sramana Mitra: The three of you now had validation. How did you get the product built?

Dave Terry: We brought on our first developers and just got busy. We then began to bring on more individuals. Within the first six months or so, we brought in our Global VP of Implementation and Client Services who also has a tremendous background in financial automation applications. She was able to help further validate and give us features and ideas on things. She was also a part of the early team. We, then, got a person who was going to handle our QA and customer support from our prior relationships as well.

We started to build up the management team from a management team who had been together for a number of years earlier. We know we have been successful together. We’ve been tremendous assets over the years. We started to build the organization from there as we were building the product.

Sramana Mitra: How much money did you and your co-founder put in? You said it took you almost a couple of years to build the product.

Dave Terry: It’s tough to quantify, but I’m sure we probably can on paper. It was some amount of money. Some of these early participants came in at exceptionally low cost to us. They understood the value of working with us as a team. They saw the vision. They came to us for very low cost for additional upside of having more equity. We did use some of those as drivers in the early days to get the company started with what we felt were very talented individuals.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next milestone? You released your product in 2010?

Dave Terry: We came out with the product in late 2008 and got the first three early adopters implemented and installed. They were happy. We were selling in earnest in early 2009.

Sramana Mitra: You started the company in 2006?

Dave Terry: In 2007.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry
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