From Australia to Silicon Valley: Leigh Jasper’s Amazing Journey with Aconex (Part 6)

Sramana: You have moved to San Francisco and raised institutional financing from local VCs. Based on my knowledge of the industry, there is obviously a game plan here, and my inclination is to believe it is a roll-up game plan. Do you plan on rolling up another $70 million to $80 million of revenue by acquiring some sub-$10 million companies?

Leigh Jasper: Not necessarily. Our biggest opportunity right now is to convert the builders that simply do not want to do anything new and want to continue to rely on spreadsheets. In the U.S. we are growing our presence and showing companies out collaboration can help in their projects. The U.S. market is beginning to see what we are doing.

We have found great traction here, and we are growing at 50%+ year on year in the U.S. We are doing that by going out and getting clients who are still using spreadsheets and email. Our game plan is to convert this market to match Australia, the U.K. and the other markets we have already converted. We will always look at M&As, and we could roll up one or two key players. The big opportunity here is growing the company into a multi-billion dollar company.

Sramana: In other words, you are saying that you want to grow organically.

Leigh Jasper: Yes. We will look at an M&A if it bolsters our products. In the past several years we have been looking heavily into mobility. We are taking a purely web-based system and allowing people to access the documents on their iPads and tablets on building sites. Mobility is a good trend for us.

Another trend we need to look at is big data. We have a huge amount of data flowing through our system. A lot of that has been generated by buildings that were using 2-D renderings and drawings that have now converted to 3-D renderings and drawings.

All of these trends have really helped collaboration come of age as well. People are used to sharing information socially and in their business environments. The cloud trend has finally gone mainstream, so we don’t have to work so hard to get people to embrace the cloud. Most IT managers today want a cloud-based management system.

These trends have been driving a significant amount of growth in our business, particularly in the past eight months. We expect those trends will all continue, which is something that will work out well for us.

This segment is part 6 in the series : From Australia to Silicon Valley: Leigh Jasper's Amazing Journey with Aconex
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