December 03, 2007
Where Are They Now: Marc Fleury of JBOSS
Marc Fleury, the French-born entrepreneur who founded open source company JBoss in the US after the bubble burst in 2001 was featured in BusinessWeek back in 2005. He waved away a few open source myths in that story and about a year later came the announcement that the profitable venture was to be acquired by Red Hat for $350M.
Only a few months after the combination of the two companies, he stepped down from a management role there.
So where is he now? He's still in the US, and he's reportedly taking it easy, doing some gaming, studying some biotech, and being a DJ.
We will probably find out via his blog what he will do next. Called Maison Fleury, it offers irreverent commentary on open source projects. It also has some tips for entrepreneurial techies in a series prefaced with the following notes: Now enjoying my status as a sage of the industry, which is to say I am older than 20, but alas, not a billionaire... people are all the time asking me for nuggets of wisdom from my vast experience at the top.
Posted at 11:28 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 30, 2006
Ohnemus' Asset4 Taps Goldman Sachs As Strategic Partner
Yesterday Zug-based Asset4, an extra- financial data provider, announced it tapped Goldman Sachs to help sell its platform to the investment bank's clients and as a minority investor in an ongoning financing round.
Financial data services are on the edge of our scope but this is one of our Where Are They Now posts.
Asset4 was co-founded founded by Peter Ohnemus (right), one of Europe's famous founders from the bubble era. In the mid-nineties he co-founded The Fantastic Corporation, a Swiss software company that wanted to enable broadband content delivery from creator to customer.
It was backed by big name investors, had a successful float on Germany's now defunct Neuer Markt in 1999, and proceeded to achieve a market cap of of over $3B. Fantastic's sales never took off as expected, losses grew, and when the bubble burst, the stock plummeted accordingly.
Ohnemus, who was 35 then, left shortly after the IPO and has been an active business angel in the region until starting up Asset4 last year.
Its main product takes extra-financial data (such as environmental compliance, social, sustainability, and corporate governance information) and uses it to rate publicly-traded companies.
Asset4 sales pitch is based on the conviction that corporate governance practices are among the most important non-financial factors that have a direct impact on a company’s value over the long term. This chart is from one of its recent presentations.
The a:c euro visited Asset4 about a year ago and at that time its early investors and founders had invested about SFr8.5M for the startup phase.
Read - ASSET4 Enters into a Strategic Relationship with Goldman Sachs (businesswire)
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May 29, 2006
Intershop's Founders' New Ventures
The alarm:clock euro takes a look at Intershop today in one of our periodic Where Are They Now? posts. We had been hearing one or two founders of Intershop, the former dotcom star, had left over the years, but we didn't realize until this week that all of them have now moved on to start new ventures.
The tipoff came from a paper published by Guido Buenstorf and Dirk Fronahl, two Max Planck Institute of Economics researchers. The two have examined the Intershop story and determined that some 27 startups can trace their roots to Intershop (many of them are located in the Intershop tower in Jena- image right). We have a link to it below and a list of Intership founders and their new ventures.
Intershop founders do the serial entrepreneur thing.
- Frank Gessner (open source mail order software founded in 2005)
- Wilfred Beeck (joined in 2002 bringing software product line for SMEs from Intershop) Update: URL and company name corrected. June 1, 2006.
- Karsten Schneider (operator of online photo processing sites for consumers acquired by HP in December 2005)
- Stephan Schambach (Woburn-based ecommerce on demand software company founded in 2004 backed by NorthBridge Venture Partners and General Catalyst Partners)
Intershop was founded by a team of entrepreneurs in 1994 who had the smarts to sell their software in the US just as the online retail market started to take off. It became one of the top 3 vendors of ecommerce software with sales peaking at €123 M in 2000.
Much was made about the founders growing up behind the Iron Curtain and the fact that they had raised venture-capital. They became famous founders. The startup went public with a fantastic valuation. Then the stock market bubble burst. Demand for its software tanked and so did its share price.
In the meantime, it has been called one biggest annihilators of investor money (a dubious distinction granted it by a German investor protection association).
According to estimates made by the association, stock valued Euro 10,000 at the end of 2000 would have a value of Euro 27 at the end of 2005.
Despite all that, Intershop is still in business, serving high-end large-sized companies with its ecommerce software. Its latest annual sales figure is €17.8M and is calling for profits this year and has started to hire staff again. Employee numbers had shrunk from 1200 at its peak to 219 as of April. It also announced in 2005 that it had settled the shareholder lawsuit that had been hanging over the firm.
Read - B2C - BUBBLE TO CLUSTER? THE DOT.COM BOOM AND SOFTWARE ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN AN EAST GERMAN REGION*
Posted at 07:24 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 03, 2006
Connecting The Dots On Marco Börries Connected Life
We were wondering whatever happened to Marco Börries, the young German entrepreneur that sold his office software company, StarDivision to Sun Microsystems back in 1999.
He was a bit of a legend in our part of Europe for his vision of creating a complete office suite meant to compete head on with Microsoft, and for using what was in 1999 a novel business model for productivity software applications, it was free for personal use. (The reason we were thinking along this line is an interview we did with the founders of Sproutit in Prague, whose business software and vision reminded us a little of Boerries'.)
Turns out, he's at Yahoo, heading its Connected Life division (mobile, TV and video business) as we found out from an archived post on MocoNews.
We knew he had raised venture capital and formed Verdisoft in 2001, and had operations in Hamburg and Silicon Valley, but the a:c euro missed Yahoo acquiring it back in early 2005.
MocoNews excerpt:
At 16, he dropped out of high school in Germany to establish StarOffice, the Microsoft office suite alternative; he sold that company to Sun Microsystems in 1999, joining Sun where he continued open desktop efforts Solaris and evangelized open source through GNOME.In 2001, he founded VerdiSoft to enable his vision of the connected life between PC, TV and cell phone. Yahoo bought VerdiSoft last February, bringing Boerries in as a top executive; the results started to unfold publicly at CES. Boerries’ responsibilities: mobile, digital home, PC client, broadband relationships — “pretty much everything beyond the browser.”
There are not too many European entrepreneurs that have sold not one but two startups to Silicon Valley giants, so we're asking how long will it be until an enterprising VC convinces him to leave when his contract is up and start another venture, maybe one that will make it to IPO this time.
Read - CES 2006: Interview: Marco Boerries, SVP-Connected Life, Yahoo
Posted at 09:55 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 02, 2006
Jerome Mol is back with modest Blackberry software firm
A Dutch company that make software for the Blackberry to print emails, view PDF files, and the like, caught our attention this week, not so much because of its products, but because the co-founder and CEO’s name, Jerome Mol, rang a bell.
Mol rose to fame and fortune when he sold Prolin Software, a company he founded, to HP for $50M in 1997. As the bubble started to inflate here, he created a startup incubator in Amsterdam called GorillaPark, and a publishing company, Tornado Insider (your reporter was a stringer for its monthly magazine), efforts that received lots of media attention.
At the time it seemed like the old rules of what it takes to build a company, time, experienced management, customers, capital efficiency, and sales had changed. But as we all learned, the basics of creating a valuable venture do not change. (Are Web 2.0 startup entrepreneurs listening?)
Both efforts failed to cover their costs and fell into bankruptcy proceedings. Today, Tornado Insider is still going, but much reduced, selling access to a deal database and a weekly newsletter. GorillaPark was acquired by its management from Mol in 2004.
Mol seems to be onto something a bit more viable this time.
GPXS claims 200 percent sales growth over the last two years. The closest we could pin management down to an actual sales figure was a statement that it's expecting to turnover between €5M and €10M this year. GPXS recently acquired a smaller Blackberry software developer, Galty Technologies, and now employs 60. It has raised outside capital, but there is no disclosure on the amount.
Making software add-ons for another company’s platform is not as sexy as building something entirely new. But it makes sense for GPXS, which sells mobile office applications, a market segment that many have tried and failed to penetrate, mainly due to the slower than expected uptake of high-end smartphones.
Targeting the Blackberry user, as opposed to cellphone users in general, is one way to make sure there is an installed base that wants business-oriented applications via wireless networks.
GPXS sounds to be pragmatic and its products practical, but not as practical as the “ultimate” Blackberry accessory, the Blackberry Helmet (See video clip of Canada’s Rick Mercer demo-ing the device.)
Read - GorillaPark goes titsup
Read - Time's Mol profile circa 2000
