Bootstrapping for 30 Years: Dean Guida, CEO of Infragistics ( Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What was the next product shift?

Dean Guida: We started investing more in marketing, PR, and sales. We rode a whole bunch of technology waves. We went from the C and C++ market and started competing in the Visual Basic market. We then started shifting to selling Visual Basic developers. That just opened a lot to us. It wasn’t extra R&D work for us. It was a faster language and a faster-growing and popular developer. That helped us as well. 

Sramana Mitra: What time frame is that?

Bootstrapping for 30 Years: Dean Guida, CEO of Infragistics ( Part 6)

Dean Guida: A strategic event along the way was definitely PR. PR was important to get advocacy, authenticity, and having others say that we were legitimate. That was early on. I told you the story about Wendy’s. That was big for us. Second, I was speaking at software development shows. That was another big inflection point of helping us build credibility and create relationships in the industry. That was a big thing that we did that helped us.

The third was just the fact that we were authentic. I loved software development, so anytime that I talked to a development team, they could sense that. They could see that we cared about what we were doing. There was this one deal where I was talking with Dun & Bradstreet. I was showing them our software and they were like, “Wow, you guys built all that software? How many people are on your team? You have 17 people on your team? No way, you didn’t build that software with 17 people. “

Bootstrapping for 30 Years: Dean Guida, CEO of Infragistics ( Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What does the internet do to your business? Let’s say we are talking about the time period from 1994 to 1996 when the Internet was happening. How does your company change?

Dean Guida: It was way back when it started. So, we had to create a website, which helped us a lot. We got into writing user interface components for Java. Charles Schwab and FedEx built their trading and shipping applications with our development tools and our UI component. I spoke at the second Java 1, which was the best software development show in the world at the time.

Bootstrapping for 30 Years: Dean Guida, CEO of Infragistics ( Part 4)

Dean Guida: We got out there and we were in a room with 12 people. These were the guys who wrote the compiler, debugger, linker, and then there’s me and my girlfriend. I was like, “Oh my god. Don’t hold my hand. Don’t look at me. Don’t do anything.” Chris, a guy that was there, went on to create the C# language. I was a hardcore developer at the time.

My girlfriend was in the tech space but not as hardcore as us. It turns out that she solved more problems than I did. Everything went well. I created a better relationship with all the guys there. We did a deal with Borland. Borland put our product, a code generation visual design tool, into all their Borland C, Turbo C, Turbo Pascal, and all their boxes.

Bootstrapping for 30 Years: Dean Guida, CEO of Infragistics ( Part 3)

Dean Guida: When we finally finished our first version and were going to bring it to market, everybody was reading this Charles Petzold book. It was this 600-page book. You had to learn all these APIs. We were going to market with this framework to help people build business applications faster, but no one was going to want to learn more APIs.

Before we went to market, we created this tool around it where you can visually build menus and screens and connect them to data. We then generated a C code. We created this development environment and then we went to market. What is amazing is that 33 years later, we are still building UI controls.

Bootstrapping for 30 Years: Dean Guida, CEO of Infragistics ( Part 2)

Dean Guida: When I graduated from school, I moved up to New York City because I wanted to work for all the smart people. There is a lot of money in New York City. I started my company when I was 23. It was 1989. All the smart people like Microsoft and these other companies were in New York.

I was a freelance consultant. I first had a job with GE Consulting. I was very young, so they were saying; “We can’t hire you with the rates we hire. You are just too young.” I said, “Look, I am really good. I love writing software. Wherever you put me, I’ll not only do a good job but I will also get more consultants here for you.”

Bootstrapping for 30 Years: Dean Guida, CEO of Infragistics (Part 1)

Dean has a real passion for the elegance, simplicity, and beauty of software development. He has built a company celebrating these values.

Sramana Mitra: We will start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised?

Dean Guida: When I was six years old, my mom and dad got divorced. I moved to Miami, Florida. I saw how much my mom struggled to make money for us, When I was eight years old, I just wanted to work. I convinced the maintenance man in the apartment that I was living in to let me do his work. He would pay me off the books.

How to Create a Monopoly in an Esoteric Niche: Steelcloud CEO Brian Hajost (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is the total size of the company?

Brian Hajost: We will do $8 million this year and we have 27 people.

Sramana Mitra: Are all of them in the Washington DC area?

Brian Hajost: All of them are in our office in Washington DC. As you mentioned, it is a niche product and it’s hard to understand. I cannot hire anybody on the street that has ever done this, at least this development and support work. We have to train. We get good technical people and we train them. It takes mentoring. Most of that is done face to face.