Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Europe: Gero Decker, CEO of Signavio (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How did the 20,000 people find out about it?

Gero Decker: We didn’t know how they had access to the system. We searched the web for our project. We found out that a major news outlet had blogged about us and wrote an article saying something like “This is the future of applications.” The reporter was raving about the new technology.

The system wasn’t for 20,000 people. It was an interesting insight that people were interested in our technology. We couldn’t really imagine that people would be interested in this from a use case perspective. This was more about being enthusiastic about the technology.

Fast forward one year, I got this interesting phone call. This guy sounded very anxious and said, “We’re currently restructuring our organization. I have all of the plans of how our future operation should look like. I have it in your system. I have a Board meeting in two hours but all the information is stuck in your system and I can’t access it. The server was under my desk. The power cable had fallen off, so I put it back in to reboot the server.

I asked them who they were. He’s the SVP of Operations for the German railway system. They’re currently rethinking how the operations should work. He had laid out, with his team of 20 people, this redesign. They had used our service to lay out how the German railway service on the cargo side should operate going forward. For the first time, we had actual users who were solving a problem.

I asked them, “Why are you using our system and not the stuff you have in-house?” I knew they had a similar software in-house and they had spent millions on it.  We’re not really a competitor because we were just a university project. However, their software didn’t solve this one problem. In the exercise that we did, it was instrumental to collaborate very fast. With the other product, only one person at a time can access it. It’s super hard to have people involved.

What they needed was a collaboration environment where you can always see the changes that people do and comment on each other’s changes. It supported the collaboration aspect so much better than the other product. This was the day when the idea for the company was born. We realized that we were actually solving a problem that other software couldn’t. That was enabling collaboration around the data operating model for an organization.

We were lowering the threshold of contribution so that those people who were completely untrained in these types of systems and who only spent an hour in total on these types of systems can be part of the discussion. This was in 2008 when we first toyed with the idea of creating a company.

It took another six to nine months to actually create the company. I had to finish my Ph.D. We were rewriting a lot of the code. We wanted to start the company with a good usable first version. When we started the company in the middle of 2009, we already had a pretty good first version of the system so that we could really start doing marketing.

Sramana Mitra: Let me just synthesize things a little bit. While you were doing your Ph.D., you put something together that was in your domain of business process management. A blogger wrote about it.

Gero Decker: Yes, it’s called Heise.

Sramana Mitra: That created a huge amount of interest and about 20,000 people came to the site and started using it. Then in the process of learning how these 20,000 people were using it, you started understanding the use cases and the collaboration potential of what you had put together and so forth.

Gero Decker: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: How did that journalist find out about you?

Gero Decker: She was participating on the demo day at the university.

Sramana Mitra: Timeline-wise, where are we now?

Gero Decker: We started the university project in May 2006. The 20,000 users happened around June 2007. The story with the guy calling me was not until summer of 2008. Then in May 2009, we finally created a company.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Europe: Gero Decker, CEO of Signavio
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