[midPoint] Blog: Establishing Evolveum

[Radovan Semancik]

Dear midPoint community,

We were starting up a new company in 2011. We had with very little money 
and limited business experience. However, we had a good team, a vision 
and a code. The experts would say that starting up a company based on 
engineering, with no sales, no marketing and no rich investors equals a 
suicide. Yet, a decade later, we are still here, more successful than 
ever. We have built up a sustainable business based on open source.

Back in 2011, we had the code 
<https://evolveum.com/ten-years-of-midpoint/> and we knew that we want 
to develop it. However, three things are absolute requirement for 
sustainable long-term professional software development: money, money 
and money. That was /the/ problem. We had some savings, but that was not 
enough to fund a long-term development effort. We we more than aware 
/how “basic” our code is/ and how much work is needed to make this into 
a product. We were looking at years or even decades of development 
effort. The money we had in hands could hardly cover few months of 
development works.

Of course, as every self-respecting start-uppers at the times, we were 
considering venture capital. Slovakia was a business backwater at the 
time, investors were few and far between (unless you wanted to invest in 
organized crime, of course). Yet, we have managed to get in contact with 
few venture capital investors. Turned out, they were more interested in 
capital than venture, expecting unrealistic growth that we could not 
provide.

We were on our own. Bootstrapping was the only realistic option, and 
even that was much less realistic than we imagined. Fellow conspirators 
Katka Stanovská and Igor Farinič prepared a business plan for a 
bootstrapped company. The plan projected a break-even point in two 
years. I didn’t like the plan. It was too optimistic, too risky, there 
were bold assumptions and insufficient reserves. Nobody with their right 
mind could follow that plan. Then, of course, we did.

I’m not sure what persuaded me to go for it. It was perhaps trust in 
people in our team. Perhaps it was our best chance to develop a code, a 
code that we would be forced to drop otherwise. Perhaps it was just a 
momentary lapse of reason. I do not know for sure to this day. Yet, 
looking back, I’m glad that we have made that foolish decision, a 
decision that literally changed our lives in many unexpected ways.

In August 2011 we have formally established Evolveum. Of course, the 
beginnings were much harder than we had planned. There was no break-even 
point in two years. Instead, we have invested all our savings, borrowed 
money, went pretty much all in. It was quite a ride. But that is another 
story for another day.

The investments started to really pay back only after a decade. This was 
not the most profitable way of investing money. However, Evolveum was 
still a huge success, especially in ways that cannot be measured 
financially. We have secured a sustainable funding for an open source 
project. We have created intereting jobs, jobs that are desperately 
needed for the future of our country. We have developed a software that 
is a major enabler. It makes identity management deployment feasible for 
many academic organizations. It makes government identity management 
deployments much more transparent. It allows enterprises to use identity 
management software in ways that were not possible before. MidPoint is a 
game-changer for many organizations.

Starting Evolveum was a leap of faith. Evolveum grew from a crazy idea 
to an established and financially-stable company. We did it all 
ourselves, with a support from customers and midPoint community. We 
could not wish for anything better.

(Reposted from Evolveum blog <https://evolveum.com/establishing-evolveum/>)

-- 
Radovan Semancik
Software Architect
evolveum.com

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