Bootstrapping Using Services to $35M from Ireland, Then Raising $70M: Teamwork CEO Peter Coppinger (Part 1)

Peter has led a terrific vertical cloud business from Ireland and now runs a global SaaS company that is kicking ass.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Peter Coppinger: I’m the CEO of Teamwork.com. We are based in Ireland, but we have customers all over the world. I was born in West Cork, Ireland. At a young age, I was very inspired by the likes of Bill Gates. I couldn’t wait to get to college to get going. I thought I’d end up in the States. Somehow, I’m still in Ireland, but we do have a global footprint. I spend a lot of time in the States visiting customers.

We launched Teamwork back in 2011. Today, we have over 20,000 customers doing over $40 million a year. We’ve been bootstrapped up until last year when we decided to take some money.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to college. Where did you do college?

Peter Coppinger: I did in CIT in Ireland. The internet was exploding around that time. I was going around every bar and restaurant trying to sell a website. They often asked what a website is. I heard about this other guy doing the same thing.

Sramana Mitra: What year was that?

Peter Coppinger: 1999. The internet was still new. I met my co-founder doing the same thing. We joined forces and we started a consultancy.

Sramana Mitra: A web development agency?

Peter Coppinger: Yes. Within a year, we started to get a lot of requests as we built our reputation for web applications. It became our specialty – building database-driven applications. Then we got into Pfizer and a lot of large multinationals.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get to these companies?

Peter Coppinger: Lucky break. You hustle and hustle. You keep doing great work and then, one day, you get a lucky break. Pfizer was our lucky break. We got to build a huge internal application. It was incredibly successful.

Sramana Mitra: Deconstruct that lucky break for me.

Peter Coppinger: It’s hustle. It’s putting yourself out there, attending events. We attended a user group for a technology we were using. We got to know some guys within Pfizer who were at that user group.

Sramana Mitra: What user group was that?

Peter Coppinger: ColdFusion. It was what we built our initial company on. Pfizer invited us to bid.

Sramana Mitra: You built your expertise on ColdFusion?

Peter Coppinger: We did. We were strong technically. We were using several languages. We found that we were productive with ColdFusion. It would have been more popular if Adobe had open-sourced it earlier. Because we were specialized in this, we were able to get invited inside Pfizer. From there, our business took off.

Sramana Mitra: Who facilitated that invitation?

Peter Coppinger: Just a local user group. You’re talking about 10 people who were using this technology. Two of those people were from inside Pfizer and they invited us.

Sramana Mitra: What you are describing is something that happens a lot. This is the precursor to social media. In the timeline you’re describing, social media was not yet there. In the online universe out there, there are user groups and open source communities on various technologies. If you socialize in those communities, there are a lot of opportunities to have this kind of serendipity happen.

Peter Coppinger: It’s all about the hustle. It’s all about people. It’s also about going the extra mile when you do get an opportunity. In the early days, it was just the two of us. We always went the extra mile. We always gave great support. As we scaled our agency, we tried to keep that ethos.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services to $35M from Ireland, Then Raising $70M: Teamwork CEO Peter Coppinger
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