Bootstrapping Using Services from The Netherlands to a $300M+ Exit: Quintiq and ActiVote Founder Victor Allis (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You took money from private equity that gave you some liquidity to the founders and gave you growth capital to move to the next phase.

Victor Allis: Only liquidity to the founders. This is what was happening. I moved to the United States in 2010. We did a bit of press release. Suddenly, everybody was knocking on my door offering us money. I said no. They said, “That’s exactly why we want to give it to you.”

Sramana Mitra: I have a saying that VCs love to come to the rescue of victory.

Victor Allis: Exactly. At that point, I realized that Aryan and I and the other four founders were getting a little hesitant. Part of that was because we never took money off the table. I pitched all those private equities and said, “You need to give me a valuation that is at least this much. If it is, I’ll take it to the founder meeting.”

48% was sold to private equity. It all went to the founders and some of the employees who had some stocks. The effect of that was we were all now comfortable with growth. It helped ease that feeling of what if everything goes south. It also allowed me to hire a few more people– a Chief Marketing Officer and a VP of Professional Services.

Sramana Mitra: In 2014, you are $100 million and you got an exit. Tell me more about that.

Victor Allis: We were not looking for an exit. Our private equity was thinking that they invested in 2011 and are not in a hurry. In 2013, we were partnering with a company that had been acquired by a big French multinational. We realized that we can work more with them. I met with them at their headquarters. They came to our headquarters saying they want to buy us. It was a really good company.

In a process of about a year, we closed the deal. We closed in September 2014. I stayed another two and a half years. In the year that we sold, we had $92 million in revenue. I didn’t plan to sell at that time. Given where the market was, all the big guys were buying supply chain companies and we realized that the largest supply chain company wasn’t a supply chain company. They were all bought by others.

Sramana Mitra: Do you feel comfortable discussing the specifics?

Victor Allis: It was $340 million. It was a good value. We were a perpetual license company and not a SaaS company.

Sramana Mitra: So 2016 to 2017, you have finished integrating. Did you leave?

Victor Allis: I stayed on a year and a half as CEO. We were a hundred-million-dollar company in a three-billion-dollar company. I’m more of an entrepreneur type and less of a division head type. Then I got my second-in-command promoted to CEO. I stayed on as Chief Puzzle Solver. I got to play around with algorithms and AI. I did that for a year until I said goodbye. I started a new chapter in my life.

Sramana Mitra: What is the new business? You’re doing this out of Boston?

Victor Allis: Three of us decided that we weren’t done doing things. We wanted to address a problem with democracy. I realized that there is this strange thing in America where there are lots of activist groups. When it’s time to vote, many of them don’t know that they can vote. They definitely don’t know who is on their ballot. They may know who’s running for Governor but not who’s running for Statehouse, school board, or district attorney.

All that information is out there, but people don’t know about it. We built an app called ActiVote. People can download it. Once you have that, it will show you the people you can vote for. It’s non-partisan. People don’t like voting for people they don’t know. With the app, they can sit at home and see the people who are on their ballot.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services from The Netherlands to a $300M+ Exit: Quintiq and ActiVote Founder Victor Allis
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