Bootstrapping a Virtualization Services Company: Chris Grandi, CEO of Abacus Group (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to?

Chris Grandi: 2001. At the end of 2001, I was essentially committed to taking off six months to figure out what I was going to do about starting my next company. Despite not making money in that first entrepreneurial endeavor, I was committed to starting my own company. As I started that process, I connected with this IT services company based out of Boston with a business model that focuses on providing IT services to hedge funds. They had a West Coast operation that was not very big. They hired me as a consultant to step in and take a look and figure out how to make it better. I spent three months doing that and realized that I liked it. I approached them and said, “This is something I’m interested in doing full time. I did do Wall Street. This is a mix between technology and Wall Street.” At that point, I became the President of that company and ran that for almost eight years.

Sramana Mitra: That was system integration work.

Chris Grandi: It’s actually like outsourced IT. Hedge funds, despite running most of the world’s money these days, are very small as far as organizations and number of people are concerned. What we did was very similar to what bigger companies like IBM Global Services used to do where you outsourced all of the technologies. These hedge funds don’t have any IT personnel. They don’t have IT knowledge. They would outsource everything to us. That includes management of the trading system, all the way down to managing the desktops and the phones.

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to 2009?

Chris Grandi: I started this company in January 2008. I started this company because the hedge market was going to go to an inflection point with technology. They’re going to demand a different technical solution. I left my prior company. I was not an owner of that company and started my own company in 2008.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping a Virtualization Services Company: Chris Grandi, CEO of Abacus Group
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