Open Source Go-To-Market Success: Liferay CEO Bryan Cheung (Part 7)

Sramana: Has your company philosophy helped you to retain your employees?

Bryan Cheung: People stay with Liferay because they have a passion for technology, but ultimately they came to a place where they could do more than earn a paycheck. They want to work for a company that is doing something beyond just building another corporate business.

Sramana: Liferay has incubated a sense of belonging through philosophy, which attracts a certain type of employee.

Bryan Cheung: Every year we have a retreat where everyone in the company gathers. This year we had almost 200 people gather near Los Angeles, and we recorded a music video that included everyone in Liferay. We put that video on YouTube, and you can see that employees do share a common philosophy.

Sramana: Where are the people in terms of global operations?

Bryan Cheung: Our headquarters is in Los Angeles. We have European headquarters based in Frankfurt, which is where I am now. We also have branch offices in Madrid, Bangalore, Budapest, and China. There are also operations in Brazil, the UK, the rural United States, and a few engineers around the world.

Sramana: Are these branch offices engineering offices?

Bryan Cheung: Some are engineering and some are sales. The Budapest offices does support, but they also do sales and engineering. It really is driven by the open source community. We find people who are enthusiastic about Liferay, and if we find a critical mass in a location, we hire people there and even do a company formation in that area.

Sramana: What is going on in Brazil?

Bryan Cheung: Back in 2006 and 2007, a guy named Bruno really loved Liferay, and he convinced his employer to let him do an internship with us in L.A. He came here for six months, returned to Brazil, and decided that he wanted to work with us. He was our first hire in Brazil, and very quickly we found three other people who were in his social network who also had some experience with Liferay. That group has been working with us for three years, but we just formalized the office in early 2010.

They are heading up sales for South America and focus on engineering. We do core engineering around user interface (UI) development. The cool user experience you get with Liferay is being developed down there. They have been working with the UI team at Yahoo!. and they are putting together an open source project called Alloy which is doing cool stuff in the realm of CSS and Ajax.

Sramana: Is Liferay still self-funded?

Bryan Cheung: Yes, it is. We talk to a lot of VCs every year, and we still get two to three e-mails from VCs every week. We are very honest with them. We want to decide what is best for the open source community, and we want to keep executing on our vision to give 10% of our annual profits to a nonprofit organization or to the Liferay Foundation. We can’t really be acquired because that will kill the culture, and we would no longer call the shots.

We don’t want to go public because of the compliance and quarterly earnings requirements. One could argue that being a public company takes away from the vision of the company. If you look at how companies used to be built, they used to have a bigger vision. We don’t get that as much these days. As a society, our culture has become about the bottom line.

Sramana: This is an interesting story; thank you for sharing it.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Open Source Go-To-Market Success: Liferay CEO Bryan Cheung
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