Business in Vancouver's “How I Did It” feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week's issue, serial entrepreneur Mark Cunningham talks about building and selling his fourth company, Indicee Inc., to business information giant Dun and Bradstreet Inc. (NYSE:DNB), and how the companies he founded helped foster Vancouver's niche expertise in business intelligence and analytics.
“In the early '90s, we created a company – it was part of my family business, the Cunningham Group – called Crystal. We created Crystal Reports. It became Crystal Decisions. Crystal Decisions became Business Objects and Business Objects became SAP (Canada Inc., Vancouver).
“After we sold Crystal, I started another company called Symmetrics, which is a software company – again in the analytics business, intelligence space. That company exists today and continues to grow. I don't run that personally. I'm basically just the chairman of that company and a significant shareholder.
“Indicee started in 2007. Cloud was becoming the big new movement. As well, there was an opportunity at the time where a lot of the people that I knew and trusted in at Crystal – smart people – were starting to leave SAP. It was an opportunity for me to assemble a really killer team of people, combined with a market opportunity to create this new product.
“The challenge with business intelligence is that it's very expensive and it's a very complex set of tools and capabilities and [takes] lots of professional services to make it work. So what we were trying to do is create a much more simplified user experience.
“As we started moving it into the market, we were out there making waves, making noise. We did a big partnership with Salesforce.com. We started to get courted by a number of strategic investors and buyers who started to ask us if we were interested in selling the company.
“I have two focuses as a leader of a company. No. 1 is I have a responsibility to my shareholders. However, I'm also representing my team and what's the best fit for the team. You want to get the good outcomes for the investors. They're less excited about the product than the team. It's that balancing act of actualizing the dollar value from the exit but also maximizing the opportunity for the team.
“We had other opportunities that I think could have resulted in more money, but we pursued this one harder. We had a number of different parties looking at us and D&B was by far the coolest opportunity. What was exciting about it is that D&B wanted to modernize their technology. They looked at our team as the experts in cloud technology, analytics, data technology that can take this older, established brand – they've been around for 171 years – and bring the excitement of a startup to help with the transformation.
“We're all about data and analytics. There's actually a lot of talent in this city around this type of technology. ...
“We're going to keep going just like a startup, within a big company. ... We're going to grow to hundreds of people over the next couple of years.
