Bootstrapped Sitecore Using Services to $1B Exit from Denmark

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Sitecore not only reached global scale, but was competing with Oracle, Adobe, IBM, and Salesforce.com when I spoke with then CEO Michael Seifert in 2014. European software companies were seldom reaching global scale at that time. Sitecore was acquired by EQT AB for $1.1B in 2016. Read on to learn how he navigated the market.

Sramana: Michael, where are you from? What is the background to your story?

Michael Seifert:?I was born in the Copenhagen area where I lived until first grade. I then moved to a little island in Denmark with a population of about fifty thousand people. I lived there with my mother and her brothers through high school. My father moved to the US when I was 8 or 9. I spent my summer vacations in the Bay area with my father. My first flight to the US was at age 11.

Sramana: Your father moved to the Bay area, so I am assuming that is where you got your early exposure to this culture?

Michael Seifert:?Yes. He started a company called SunFlex. I enjoyed going to work with him and that is where I was exposed to my first computer.

Sramana: What year was that?

Michael Seifert:?I was around 11 years old, so that would have been around 1980.

Sramana: Let’s flash forward a bit. Did you stay in Denmark for college?

Michael Seifert:?After high school, I went to the Bay area for a year and lived with my father. I worked as a personal assistant at his company. I moved back to Denmark and worked for a year to get into computer science studies. I then started at Copenhagen University doing my studies in the laboratory of psychology in Human Computer Interaction.

Sramana: That was in the early 1990s?

Michael Seifert:?Yes.

Sramana: What happens after that?

Michael Seifert:?I moved back to the Bay area for 2 years. I worked in a game startup for a year. After that, I started my own company, an Internet casino. At the time that was a novel idea, but I ran into a lot of legislative problems. The law changed rapidly and it turned into something where anyone running an Internet casino would go to jail, so I decided I should do something different with my life.

In 1998, I decided to go back to Denmark. I called up some of my friends who had helped me start up the online casino business and asked them if they would like to help me start a system integration company. They agreed to it. I was the first employee, and about six months later, my friends started to join, one by one.

Our conversation continues here.

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