Endeca

“The only way you could monetize such a database is if someone could find something within three clicks. If they had to spend a lot of time looking for that pricing information, they weren't going to use it.”

“By the time we got to August, 2001, we had less than two months cash left.”

“From first email to announcement with Oracle was six weeks, a testament to how fast Oracle can align their teams and make something happen.”

“One of them was SAP. They were an investor in the company, and I couldn't get their corporate development team to even talk to us.”

“If I had framed the world as e-commerce sooner, we probably would have had a much longer runway as an independent company. We would have at least had a chance to enter the world of Shopify, but we didn't.”

“They basically overnight went from competing for every deal with IBM to suddenly being the dominant on-prem e-commerce company.”

“We had half of the top 100 e-commerce sites.”

“And that was the birth of guided navigation or faceted search, which is everywhere on the internet today. You use it all the time and you don't even realize it.”

“They spent twenty million dollars on us over the years and were using us for very important internal applications that they could not power with their own software.”

“In fact, the only two firms that were competing to back it at a reasonable valuation were my two lead investors at Indeca that fall.”

“The other thing to note here is we went from having no revenue all year, or virtually none, because we had one customer from the year before, to doing a two million dollar quarter in Q-IV, which was a very strong quarter.”

“There were two other moments we could have exited the business. One was around 2005 where Amazon was very attracted to what we were doing.”