Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Belgium: Felix Van de Maele, CEO of Collibra (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Why did your current VP of Sales join your company? What was it in your company or in what you told him that convinced him to join your company?

Felix Van de Maele: I think that’s a really good question. We were very early. We had no revenues. We had no customers. He thought strategically about the problem and the  shift. Ultimately, we ended doing something slightly different. He was adventurous enough to take a big risk. We consider him a co-founder today.

Sramana Mitra: When he came on board, was that still in the first year?

Felix Van de Maele: It was in December of 2009.

Sramana Mitra: So 2009, you now have three customers. What kind of deal sizes are we talking? How much were they paying?

Felix Van de Maele: Very less. Like I said, we actually shifted focus and focused only on data governance. The first version was a plug-in. It was almost a free product. Then we thought of developing the next versions. That’s when we started to get some more traction. We started going to events especially in the US and started closing more customers.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you do in the second year?

Felix Van de Maele: About €200,000.

Sramana Mitra: That’s pretty good. How many customers did you have at the end of the second year?

Felix Van de Maele: Maybe five.

Sramana Mitra: So they were paying a substantial amount. Was a use case becoming prominent that all these customers wanted you to solve?

Felix Van de Maele: Yes, that was really important. The first version of our product was a business glossary. We helped customers capture data definitions. What is the meaning of customer? What is the meaning of product? It’s actually a big problem that a lot of companies struggle with. The first couple of customers were Belgian. There were a couple of government agencies. It was hard. I remember very well that we had a public RFP competing against IBM. We ended up winning the contract. If we hadn’t won, I think we would have run into cash problems. Afterwards, we heard that the reason why we won was because we were €2,000 cheaper than IBM. We were, in a way, very lucky. We did focus on large companies right from the start and closed the first year around €30,000 to €50,000.

Sramana Mitra: What is the next major strategic move?

Felix Van de Maele: We had basically no leads. What do you do? Who do you call? We started sponsoring these data governance events, most of which were in the US. We just started traveling to the US doing these events and starting to make a name for ourselves. We started to sell to US customers from Belgium. So there were a lot of late nights on the phone trying to close customers in the US. NetApp was actually our  first customer in the US.

Sramana Mitra: You closed it without having to visit? Were you able to close it by phone?

Felix Van de Maele: It was interesting. We met the person at an event. They were about to choose either IBM or Informatica. We convinced them to take a look at us and then we closed over the phone from Belgium.

Sramana Mitra: What was the problem that NetApp had that you were able to solve?

Felix Van de Maele: For consistency of definitions, let’s say the CEO asks his CFO and CMO what the install base is. Then he gets two different answers. The CFO says, “We have 3,000 customers.” The CMO says, “We have 5,000 customers.” They may both be right but it all depends on how you install base. The definition of all these metrics and terms is really important if you want to trust the data and the numbers. That was, in the beginning, the key driver. All of these use cases around BI, reporting, and analytics are only as valuable if you can trust the data. To trust the data, you need to understand what you’re measuring. The definitions there are really important.

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