Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Given that was your analysis of the market, how did you get the venture off the ground? Did you raise money? Did you self-finance?

Dave Terry: It was just Alan and me. Our prior organization was an all licensed in-house model. We knew we wanted to build this entire organization as a SaaS infrastructure. We went out and got a very talented CTO who had experience in working with large, high-transaction volume SaaS operations.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get that person?

Dave Terry: We found him through local recruiting. Our company is headquartered in LA. We were fortunate to come across a person who had experience of a number of years of both consulting and direct organizations, supporting high transaction volume enterprise applications.

Sramana Mitra: So you got this person through a recruiter. The question then is typically in those kinds of situations, oftentimes, key hires want to see funding? Did you have funding or were you able to get the person on a bootstrapped basis?

Dave Terry: We just had an awesome idea, and maybe Alan and I are fairly good sales people.

Sramana Mitra: You put in some money of your own to get this going?

Dave Terry: We were completely self-funded and actually for the first five years of our growth. We hired our CTO who made our initial developer hire. Like a software application unlike other service-oriented businesses, it took us about a year before we even went to market. We started in 2007 in the basement, if you will, with a website that said, “Coming Soon.” It wasn’t until late 2008 when we released the product and went public with it. Here’s the approach we took though. We had what we thought was this very good idea. We drew it all up on a data sheet—the requirements, what we’re going to do, and how we’re going to build it out.

We went to three very large global footprint law firms. We selected law firms obviously because we had relationships with them previously. They knew us and we knew that they would open the door and listen. It’s not a law firm-based system by any stretch. It’s just that we knew them. We began with three of the top global law firms in the world and showed them our idea and said, “If we build this, would you buy it?” They said they would. Essentially, we knew that we had three of the largest law firms in the world if we built this.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry
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