Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Belgium: Felix Van de Maele, CEO of Collibra (Part 2)

,Sramana Mitra: How did you go about starting it?

Felix Van de Maele: I did my Master’s thesis in data integration, which is a well-known problem. I wrote a one-pager saying what I wanted to do. We wanted to raise a seed round and build the product. We were going to do $50 million in five years because that’s what you’re supposed to say. I gave that one-pager to my professor at the university. He said, “Fine. Go ahead.”

We started talking to the technology transfer office at the university which specializes in taking intellectual property and commercializing that. They have investment friends. We started talking to different people, worked the first version of the business plan, and wrote seven more versions. That whole trajectory took about a year. Ultimately, we incorporated in June 2008 and raised our seed round in August 2008.

Sramana Mitra: To start the company, what did you do? You didn’t have a product idea. Did you start doing something as services? How did you get yourselves off the ground?

Felix Van de Maele: We went to look for a problem. We thought that data integration is a well-known problem and you can solve it better with semantic technologies. That was the idea that we were focused on. We were focused on how to bring non-technical people together to capture the meaning of data. In research, we were outcasts because other people were doing research on natural language processing, reasoning, and semantic search. In our preparation, we found a test customer.

We signed a Letter of Intent with that one potential customer. They were interested in the technology and the solution and they would like to test it. Based on that, we raised our seed round and we started coding the product, which took us about a year. In the meantime, we were doing testing with that particular client, who never actually became a customer.

During that journey, we actually figured out that the technical part of the technical integration wasn’t that interesting. It was really just bringing the business people together to define what data means and how you can use it. That was interesting. In a way we did little bit of a pivot. The vision was still the same but the application of the technology changed in the first two to three years.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about the first year in terms of the number of customers, use cases you did, and revenue level. How did the first year turn out?

Felix Van de Maele: We were four people. Pretty quickly, we hired three more developers. We started building the product and working with the pilot customer. There was no revenue. After one whole year, there was no customer. After a year of developing, we understood that we had no idea what sales look like because all of the founders were technical. We hired our VP Sales right from the start. He came out of Microsoft. He was able, in the first three months, to close three deals that we’d been trying to close for six months. When he came on board, we started to become more serious in sales and started to grow in revenues and customers.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Belgium: Felix Van de Maele, CEO of Collibra
1 2 3 4 5 6 7