A Pilot’s Heroic Journey: Jonny Nicol, CEO of Stratajet (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’m interested in success from a financial point of view. What kind of revenues were you able to generate with that company and what happened to it?

Jonny Nicol: In the first month, revenues were $100. In month 11, it was $238,000. I actually disagree that you measure the success of a company solely by its revenues.

Sramana Mitra: From One Million by One Million perspective, we are trying to build businesses. The way we evaluate businesses or study businesses is based on revenue growth and growth metrics. You can have whatever belief system you have, but the reason we are doing your story is we care about how you grew your revenues. How long did it take you to reach $1 million in revenue with the first company?

Jonny Nicol: We didn’t. In month 11, I had to go back to the military. When I did that, my business partner couldn’t run it by himself. The company faded away. When I went back to the military, I was very clear that I wanted to come up with something that could be a multi-billion pound company. I believe you can only do that by inventing a product where nothing exists. That was company one.

Company two was a hardcore computer science play. It doesn’t really fit into the story because it was what I had to do in order to leave the military. It’s actually very hard to leave. Part of the deal for my leaving was that I would build the computer system for the Ministry of Defense, which would alleviate a lot of the problems they had around information on soldiers.

Unfortunately, it is covered under the Official Secrets Act. I can’t talk about it very much, but I can tell you that I successfully did that single-handedly – writing the code, getting it accepted by the military, and getting people using it. That entire cycle, I had to do single-handedly because of the nature of protecting information. That was very successful.

Sramana Mitra: What does very successful mean? How much of this product did you sell?

Jonny Nicol: I sold the entire thing by Hewlett-Packard. It’s under the guise of EDS Defense. That was over $1 million.

Sramana Mitra: Did you sell it to any client or did you sell it directly to HP to take over the whole process?

Jonny Nicol: Directly to HP. I had to.

Sramana Mitra: You basically developed some code and then handed it over to HP.

Jonny Nicol: The client was the British military.

Sramana Mitra: What year was this?

Jonny Nicol: We’re now in 2010.

This segment is part 2 in the series : A Pilot’s Heroic Journey: Jonny Nicol, CEO of Stratajet
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