RE° 1168(Medium impression) - BUSINESSINSIDER : This Guy Arrived In The U S With Sold A Startup For Half A Billion And Is Working On Another Cool Company: Christian Gheorghes life is a rags-to-riches story worthy of a Disney movie, and no one is more surprised, or grateful, than he is. He arrived in the U.S. from communist Romania in the early 1990s speaking no English, with $26 in his pocket. He lived in a youth hostel and drove a limo for a living. Today hes working on his forth successful startup, having sold all of his previous ones, including his third one, OutlookSoft, to SAP in 2007 for about $500 million. How he got from Romania to successful startup founder is truly remarkable. In Romania, he made his living selling music records and taught himself a little bit of English by listening to English music like Pink Floyd, he told Business Insider. When he sold enough records, he bought himself a Commodore 64 knock-off PC, which cost the equivalent of a years wages. People asked me, are you crazy? he laughs. He taught himself to code by hacking into the video games on that machine. After arriving in the U.S., he stumbled into a job as a limo driver and thats how he met a man named Andrew Saxe. During the ride, Saxe learned about Gheorghes interest in computers and told him to come by his office. Saxe ran a computer software consulting company. He hired Gheorghe and the two built a company together, one of the earliest that did big data, though they didnt call it that back then. They sold it to Experian and Gheorghe found himself CTO for Experian for a few years. He launched a second startup, TIAN, merged it with a company called OutlookSoft. Then SAP came along and bought OutlookSoft. OutlookSoft did a form of big data known as business analytics, where companies slice, dice, report and predict trends in their business by sifting through their financial transactions. OutlookSoft was part of a crop of business analytics companies acquired by big enterprise software vendors around that time: Oracle bought Hyperion, IBM bought Cognos, and SAP bought OutlookSoft. So Gheorghe found himself as a CTO for SAP for a couple of years. About four years ago, the bug to create a new startup hit again and Tidemark was born. It has all the signs of being another golden venture. Tidemark also does business analytics/big data, but its designed for the modern age: it works on a tablet and runs in the cloud. More importantly, it is designed to be what Gheorghe calls a revolution at the edge with a Siri-like interface. That means that business folks can use it without help from their IT departments creating pre-programmed reports. All they have to do is ask Tidemark a question, any question, about how their business is performing like ... Why isnt this product selling? What happens if we assign three more people to this project? What will our sales be next quarter? Tidemark answers with charts and graphs. It even names the people in the company who could help with the project. Its like Google mixed with Wolfram|Alpha, personalized for your job, on your tablet. Hes not the only one creating mobile, cloud-based analysis software. For instance, another hot startup, Anaplan, is doing the same and also doing well. Still Tidemarks approach – ask a question – is different. And its already attracting attention. In the first 18 months since his product became available, his company is on track to hit $45 million in revenue, Gheorghe told us, growing 300% year over year. It has about 45 customers so far, with, on average ,180 business people at each customer using the product. Tidemark has raised $93 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank and others.SEE ALSO: Why Startup Founders Happily Give Up 90% Of Their Companies Join the conversation about this story » Dont miss to like!
Posted on: Sat, 10 May 2014 17:10:45 +0000
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