Bootstrapping Using Services: George Anderson, CEO of Ninth Wave (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When did that episode happen? Was it when you did this repackaging?

George Anderson: Yes, when I did the repackaging. It was in 2001. 

Sramana Mitra: From 2001 to 2008, you ran as a bootstrapped company. How far did you get between your services, training, and software?

George Anderson: After surviving the dot-com implosion followed by 9/11 and the 2008 crash, I said, “I’m going to run this business the way I wanted to run it for me, my customers, and employees.” We settled into a nice groove and we were running to $30 million. I had the software and the services businesses.

Again, we had built a nice software business and I had a ton of great clients. When I looked at the market opportunity in front of us, I said, “If we are going to capitalize on this market opportunity, I will need more capital and expertise.” I decided to take a look at raising money again and taking a look at strategic options.

I went out in 2018 to a set of small companies in strategic venture. I said, “Let me see what I hear. Let me see what people tell me.” A lot of people passed right away. They would say that it’s too much services and they would pass.

I went back to the office and said, “Okay the market is telling me what to do here. Let’s officially spin this software out into its own entity and finance it.” It was a tremendous amount of fun and hard work.

I went out to Silicon Valley and I hired a Valley-based branding and marketing company called 1185 design. I loved them. I have so much respect for Peggy. She is a wonderful woman. She was so much fun to work with. I actually just talked to her a few weeks back.

We hired Catchword. They are a naming company. I never thought that I would hire a naming company. I hired them to find a name for the business. They interviewed me and asked me about 20 words that I would want to associate with the company.

They asked a bunch of interesting questions, and they found the answers to those questions. They must have some software that spits out name categories. One of the names that they spit out was Ninth Wave. When I first heard it, I really liked it. There was a lot of open space there.

If you searched Ninth Wave, you’d find a tattoo shop in New Jersey, a Russian painting, and a heavy metal rock band from Scotland. There wasn’t a lot out there. I also like the symbolism. They talked about wave sets and a certain wave set where the Ninth Wave is the largest.

Each wave is consecutively larger and the Ninth Wave is the largest and then it resets itself. The Ninth Wave comes along and washes everything away and then the cycle starts again. I liked that a lot. We did that in 3 months.

To make sure that we would meet our dates, I went out and spent a bunch of money on Finovate in New York. I had a demo slot and I had a booth on the floor so I had to come up with a name and a logo. I didn’t have any of that. When we first signed up, it was like placeholder company X.

I knew that if I set that kind of a deadline, we would have to get the work done. It worked. Burn the boats as they say. We launched at Finovate in 2018. We officially completed the spin-off in April of 2019. We closed the funding round right around that time as well. 

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services: George Anderson, CEO of Ninth Wave
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