Long Bootstrapped Journey into Cutting-Edge Generative AI: Jeff Kuo, Founder of Ragic (Part 1)

Businesses are finding unexpected benefits by incorporating Generative AI into their product roadmaps. Ragic has built a $5M ARR no-code platform in the market. A Generative AI front-end is adding unprecedented usability and adoption momentum. Fascinating!

Sramana Mitra: Alright, Jeff, let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of background?

Jeff Kuo: I was born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan. I mostly grew up here, but in my childhood, I lived for two years in the US in Michigan.

So, that’s where I learned a little bit of my English. I have generally kind of a good command of English, so it’s a good thing for me to operate in the English market so that I can read and write in English. So that’s something that’s kind of worked out for me in my entrepreneurial journey as compared to someone who grew up in Taiwan.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you do your technical education? Where did you go and what did you do?

Jeff Kuo: I majored in information management in the National Taiwan University (NTU). For my graduate school, I was in National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. I majored in information management. So information management is my background, which is pretty much exactly what Ragic does.

Sramana Mitra: When did you finish your studies? What year?

Jeff Kuo: That was 2003.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do when you finished?

Jeff Kuo: Since I grew up in Taiwan, there’s a mandatory military service in Taiwan that I had to do. Because of my information management background, I could join a special program or go to private company.

So I went into a private company and worked in their IT department for four years as part of my military service. We implemented Oracle, ERP, and other enterprise IT stuff.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after that? 2007, right?

Jeff Kuo: Yeah, 2007. I had been starting up a company. Right after my military service, I started Ragic. That was quite a while ago. Ragic is completely bootstrapped. We didn’t have any funding. Back then in 2007, there’s not a lot of VC or Angel funding in Taiwan. Getting funded is not really something that people talked about or focused on back then. Especially in Taiwan, most of the VCs invested in hardware companies and IC chip companies like TSMC. They’re a big industry in Taiwan. Software was not big back in 2007.

Sramana Mitra: What was the thesis of Ragic? What were you going to do with Ragic when you started?

Jeff Kuo: Ragic evolved from my master’s thesis. I was working on the technology for Ragic back then in graduate school. In the beginning, we didn’t have any money to really focus on that. We still need money to help our company stay alive.

In the beginning, we were the service partner of Interwoven in Taiwan. They got merged into Autonomy in 2009.

Sramana Mitra: The path to entrepreneurship that you’re describing is a very common path. We have a track in 1 Million By 1 Million that we call Bootstrapping using Services, which is what you did.

Jeff Kuo: Yeah, exactly.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you do that with Interwoven Services?

Jeff Kuo: I think we did that for three to four years. One thing that stopped us from continuing to doing that is the recession around 2009. For Interwoven, we were a service partner of their product called TeamSite. TeamSite is an expensive product, especially for Taiwanese companies. Most of the companies that buy them are banks and financial institutions. We were working with a lot of banks and financial institutions back then, and we were servicing them pretty well.

But then the recession hit, and suddenly, all of our projects just froze. They were trying to stop every single implementation project. That’s kind of the moment when we realized that no matter how good these service projects look at the moment, everything could freeze or stop at any moment.

That also gave us some time to think about speeding up the product launch and put more resources into our core product Ragic, because we were spending quite a bit of time in doing these service projects for Interwoven TeamSite. So right around then, we were transitioning into projects using Ragic.

Sramana Mitra: And you had some cash that you had saved up through the services projects.

Jeff Kuo: Yeah. We were doing pretty well with the service projects. So, we did have some cash saved up.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Long Bootstrapped Journey into Cutting-Edge Generative AI: Jeff Kuo, Founder of Ragic
1 2 3 4 5 6 7