Celebrating MIT’s 150th Anniversary: Alumni Ian Clemens, Founder Of IDV Solutions (Part 4)

Sramana: How did you meet and get to know Mark Morrison, your co-founder?

Ian Clemens: We were introduced by a mutual acquaintance who was an employee of Mark’s at his previous company. This person had talked with me and understood what my vision and goal was. Mark had been a serial entrepreneur, so the two of us met and really hit it off. We had common beliefs about how to run a business and what our goals were. He had enterprise experience, which is what we both saw as the target for the technology. We met in September 2003, and in January 2004 we formed the company together.

Sramana: You said the two of you shared similar beliefs about how to run a company. Would you elaborate a bit about that? I am intrigued about the process of starting a business with a co-founder who you did not know for a long time. Most co-founders have a substantial history before they take on a business venture together.

Ian Clemens: Mark is a wonderful partner and we have a great relationship. Employees and customers often comment on how well we work together. A business partnership is a lot like a marriage. It is a very big decision. I get nervous when I see people entering business partnerships with other people casually. There are a lot of hard knocks that you take along the, way and you need somebody whom you can trust. Ultimately, capitalism is founded on trust.

Mark and I had similar Christian faiths and we were both family oriented. We did not want to sell our souls for the sake of money. We have an ethical outlook when it comes to doing the right thing. We also are both very aggressive in our desire to build a business and making it happen. I was very fortunate to meet him and form a company together. We are still partners today with the same great relationship.

Sramana: What I heard you emphasize are trust and shared values over specific skills.

Ian Clemens: Yes, very much so. Those are key. The skill sets are what get you the initial meeting. We would never have met if we did not believe there was a fit to be made. We knew ahead of time that our skill sets prequalified the meeting. However, after that first meeting we knew we wanted to do something together.

Sramana: You started in January 2004 and reached out to your past contacts. Who was your first customer?

Ian Clemens: Some of our first customers were Pulte Homes, which was revamping their mapping of available housing developments on their website. They needed a better user interface to draw in customers. They saw what we were doing and from the very beginning they stressed that if you failed at the user interface then you have failed at everything else. There is no business magic behind the scenes if the user can’t get past the initial pages of the site.

Sramana: In this case you were helping a home builder develop an Internet user experience to create a compelling public front?

Ian Clemens: Yes. It is interesting that since then we have not done a lot of work on public-facing sites. Most of our work has been for internal back-end business applications. It is the same story internally. You still have to sell the project or business case, and the user experience is paramount to all of that.

A second big customer of ours was British Petroleum, or BP. I had written an article in late 2004 on next generation visualization, and interfaces. An oil and gas energy trader contacted me and we had some initial conversations which led to a few projects. Those projects have since led to a very good relationship over the years. We have done a number of different projects with them using our software.

Sramana: What were the sizes of these early projects?

Ian Clemens: I would say they were $100,000 to $500,000 projects.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Celebrating MIT's 150th Anniversary: Alumni Ian Clemens, Founder Of IDV Solutions
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