Lessons of Software Entrepreneurs

The main part of the book contains the descriptions of the decisions that were identified by the interviewees of the 16 companies that were interviewed. In describing the decisions these entrepreneurs have made while building their company, we attempt to describe the early-life decisions in such a way that other software entrepreneurs can learn from it. The 16 different companies that are described in this chapter deliver a diverse range of products; from ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software to CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and HRM (Human Resource Management) software, from BPM (Business Process Management) software to an electronic hospital information system (EHIS), and almost everything in between. There are a number of companies that make the same type of software and are competitors of each other, which provides an interesting comparison of results. Each chapter starts with an overview of some of the company data, followed by a short introduction to the company. For the majority of the companies, this introduction ends with up to three graphs that show the trend lines of their revenues, profits and number of employees from the start of the company until 2010. Some of the companies did not have the exact numbers from the early days for these graphs, and have therefore estimated what these numbers were. It should also be noted that the graphs use different scales and are to be considered as indicative trend lines. While some of the graphs might indicate for instance the number of FTEs, the graphs of other companies might indicate the number of employees. In a similar way, some profit numbers are before tax while others are after tax. A number of companies preferred not to present these data and in some cases the data were not available.