Open Source Go-To-Market Success: Liferay CEO Bryan Cheung (Part 2)

Sramana: At that time there were a lot of companies in the Valley that built expensive offices without a business plan to support them.

Bryan Cheung: I remember some of my co-workers had varied backgrounds. We met writers and former voice actors, and they were working as Web experience engineers. A lot of money was made and blown.

Sramana: What was Brian Chan’s background?

Bryan Cheung: Brian went the University of Chicago. He graduated the year after I did. He worked at Bank One in Chicago. Groundswell was his first real job out of college. He moved back to L.A. and was working from there. It was at Groundswell where we started hearing a lot about portals. Back then we had a chief strategy officer, and he would talk to us about e-business communities, which are more or less what became portals.

Our chief strategy officer was about 10 years ahead of his time. If you see what is going on with Facebook and other social networking apps, you can understand why every software company out there adds the social moniker in front of whatever they do. His ideas made sense, but the combination of the market tanking and all of the capital disappearing did not allow his ideas to take off. He wanted Groundswell to focus on building e-business communities to allow businesses to come together and have people within and outside of an organization interact and share knowledge of each other.

Brian wanted to use a portal to build a website for his church. He called salespeople and they wanted $100,000 for the software. He realized he could not afford it, so he looked at Jetspeed and did not like what he saw. So, he started writing his own portal in his spare time. This was in late 2001.

Sramana: Brian was basically doing this on the side while you were both at Groundswell?

Bryan Cheung: We had both left Groundswell by then. The company went out of business in October 2001. We both went our separate ways doing software development and consulting for different customers. I was working for Genetech and Universal Music Group. Brian ended up working at an advertising company that needed Java development. We did that independently for the next two to three years.

Sramana: When does the story bring you together again?

Bryan Cheung: In late 2003. I actually introduced Brian to an old friend of mine from high school. My firned needed someone who could help his company, a large corporate housing company, with some Java programming. I knew Brian could help him out. I introduced them, and Brian was helping them do some Java consulting and he overheard them talking about how they would like to have a website where their guests could log in and get all of their paperwork, check in on their property, and find out what was going on nearby.

Immediately a light bulb went off in his head, and he realized they needed a portal. He approached them and told them about what he had been working on. Because he had built credibility with them, they were willing to take a look at his offering, and they ultimately became one of our first customers.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Open Source Go-To-Market Success: Liferay CEO Bryan Cheung
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