Extending Product Roadmaps with Generative AI: Acrolinx CEO Volker Smid (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after?

Volker Smid: Fulfilled my lifelong dream to go to the US. It was in 2000.

Sramana Mitra: To what company?

Volker Smid: It was a US-German company that went public in the year 2000. It was called Poet. We had a marketplace catalog product, which was a big thing in the year 2000. Every marketplace needed to have a catalog and we were the catalog provider. If you remember 2000, it was a pretty crazy time.

Sramana Mitra: The market crashed in 2000.

Volker Smid: Yes, B2B was all of a sudden back to business school for many people.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you work with Poet and in what capacity?

Volker Smid: I was doing corporate development, sales, and marketing. I moved on to a company that still has the largest piece of memory for me. It’s called PTC. I was appointed to run the midmarket for Europe. I went back to run the midmarket.

Sramana Mitra: I know this very well – mechanical design software business. I did a turnaround in 2001 to 2002 of a company called Think Three.

Volker Smid: It’s a small world. I liked this assignment a lot because I admired the CEO back then. They gave me probably the edges of the diamond that you need to be successful in sales and marketing. The curriculum that they had and the training classes, that was probably one of my defining time in my career.

Sramana Mitra: What happens after?

Volker Smid: I got a call from a company called Novell, which is still well-known. I said no because I thought that Novell was a revenue-declining company. They had acquired the second largest Linux distribution called SUSE. They combined their legacy OS with a modern distribution which then inspired me.

I ended up running Europe, Middle East, Asia and Africa for five years. It was a transformational time. You needed to transform the sales organization into believing that an open source system has value for customers in an enterprise. It is hard for people to understand that a successful perpetual model can be transferred into an open source license model.

Sramana Mitra: It has now become much clearer, but the commercial open source model of starting with something that is free and then adding premium services on top was not well understood. This brings us to 2010?

Volker Smid: 2009. I received a call and asked if I was interested to join Hewlett-Packard to become the Managing Director for the German business. It took me quite some time to think through this. I grew up founding my own company and worked for midsized companies. I was reporting to the CEO. I felt I had an impact.

If you joined a company back then, HP had about 300,000 people and $120 billion in revenue. You would think that a Country Manager for such an organization is a powerful person, but the relative impact that you have is very small. It took me quite some time to decide that this was something I wanted to pursue.

The point that really interested me was that, if you look at the portfolio of solutions that HP had in 2009, they could change and shape the IT structure in a large company. This is what got me connected to the job. This is why I joined them. I was there for six years.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Extending Product Roadmaps with Generative AI: Acrolinx CEO Volker Smid
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