Tonight at Business Dinner, we are pleased to welcome Alfred Jay, Co-founder and CEO of Recollective as one of our keynote speakers to address the audience. Alfred was kind enough to answer some of our questions before the event to give some really inspiring insight into himself and what he does. We hope that you will tune in tonight to hear from Alfred as he shares more on entrepreneurship!
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1. Can you share a little about your career path to date?
I grew up and attended high school in Ottawa. As a student, I used to write computer programs as a consultant to companies, government departments, and healthcare professionals. For university, I went to Western and graduated with a HBA from Ivey Business School. On graduation, I joined a family effort to launch an Ottawa franchise of a US digital printing organization. It was my first experience as a business operator, and the business was selling a commoditized offering in a recession -- it was challenging. It wasn’t a lot of fun. It was a humbling experience, and having the small business financed with too much debt and backed by personal guarantees, it was stressful. In hindsight, it was an invaluable experience.
Two years later, after the sale of that company, I founded Recollective Inc. (originally named Ramius Corporation) in January 1998 as an Internet software company offering a free consumer service that anyone could use to sell digital products over the web. By early 2000, our web service had attracted millions of users, was growing virally, and was ranked by traffic within the top 2000 websites globally. However, the dotcom crash soon made revenue more important than traffic and we had to adjust to survive. We pivoted several times to adjust to market changes and in an attempt to seize what we saw as market opportunities. We’ve launched three major software offerings: CommunityZero (1999), Sixent (2008), and ultimately Recollective (2012) which has been our sole focus since we launched it. I’ve been CEO of the company the entire time, but the title I’m really proud of is Founder.
2. What made you decide that you wanted to pursue a path with entrepreneurship?
While at Ivey Business School, I didn’t really have entrepreneurial ambitions. At the time, becoming an entrepreneur wasn’t as immediately viable as it is today. I always had dreams of going to one of the big firms to become an investment banker or management consultant, as most of my closest friends from Business school went on to be. Although I was already an admirer of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and closer to home, of Terry Matthews and Michael Cowpland, starting my own company at the time seemed unrealistic, especially given my lack of any in-depth domain expertise. After the sale of my family’s small printing company, I took some time to travel, and spent considerable time learning about and speculating in the stock market. Having been out of school for almost five years there was no way to enter investment banking or management consulting without going back to do an MBA. Fortunately, it was around that time, that the Netscape browser was launched, along with Yahoo and the rest of the early web.
My experience helping to operate the printing company, my earlier background as a computer programmer, my understanding of the stock market, my admiration of tech visionaries, and the IPO’s of the time including Netscape, Amazon, and so many other firms, all seemed to come together and opened my eyes to the possibilities. I was drawn to the seemingly endless opportunities to build something that could reach around the world and attract millions of users and it felt like a wild west mentality with land grab opportunities. I founded my company with the stealth name of Ramius Corporation (since renamed Recollective Inc.) in January 1998 and almost immediately thereafter met my co-founder Phil Dame and we got right to work. It has been frequently exciting, sometimes scary, often challenging, and very fulfilling already, but we feel like we’re just getting to the really fun part of our story now.
3. What is the most rewarding aspect of what you do?
After many years of challenges and pivots to survive the dotcom crash of 2000 and the financial crash of 2008, I’ve come to really appreciate that the journey is the reward. I’m but one member of an amazing team at Recollective. We’ve been creative, resilient, pragmatic, driven, resourceful, daring, and lucky through some incredible challenges. We’ve made our fair share of mistakes along the way, but when we have, we’ve fixed them, learned from them, and come out stronger than ever. We’ve maintained the humility that the challenges of our past have taught us. We’ve stayed low profile and focused on building our leadership position in our industry. We have a quiet confidence that helps us to stay grounded while still aiming for the stars. I feel incredibly privileged, after so many challenging years when the future looked pretty grim, to now be surrounded by phenomenal people who I consider friends, with a shared ambition, backed by an industry leading software product we built from scratch, trusted by thousands of leading enterprise customers around the world, and growing at a rate of over 60% a year, while also achieving strong profitability. The many challenges we overcame to get to the situation we are in today, make our success feel well earned.
4. How do you stay motivated?
I think of my family who’ve always believed in me, my daughter who gives me purpose and drive, our investors who’ve believed in me since our very early days, and my team who, despite ample opportunities to be anywhere else, have chosen to be with me at Recollective. I feel it’s my responsibility to do everything I can to try and live up to their belief that I can lead our company to be the world class organization we’ve always aspired it to be.
5. What was the most difficult challenge you faced on your entrepreneurial journey?
How did you overcome it? As the financial crash of 2008 played out, it became very obvious to me that the business of Ramius Corporation would have to change, and dramatically. Prior to 2008, we were already facing challenges as competition from larger and better funded US companies was severely limiting our ability to sell our CommunityZero and Sixent general collaboration software offerings to enterprise clients. When the crash happened, it became very obvious that signing new customers would become far more difficult and the impact that would have on our cashflow would probably lead to eventual bankruptcy. Just prior to the crash, we had 29 employees, just under $4 million in sales, and were mildly profitable. Financial markets were frozen up and raising significant financing was impossible, especially with the obvious weaknesses in our business at the time. Personally, I was father to a seven year old daughter and finalizing a divorce at the time.
Over the next two years, my team and I restructured the company, rethinking and rebuilding it from the ground up. Moving to maximize our chances for survival and extend our runway, we had no choice but to undertake layoffs that reduced our headcount from 29 to 6, moved to modest offices, implemented salary cuts, eliminated benefits plans, and tried to minimize every other cost that still remained. Unfortunately though, even after all that we’d done, we still needed more money to survive long enough to have a viable chance to engineer any meaningful change. We had come to the conclusion that to survive, and to have a chance to one day thrive, we had to look at markets other than general enterprise collaboration, a market that had become dominated by much larger, deep pocketed, well marketed software companies including Microsoft and IBM. What we needed to do was to stop trying to ‘boil the ocean’ and find an emerging market opportunity we could have a chance to lead in, in which we could apply our knowledge of building 2 enterprise online community software, and which would one day have an addressable market large enough to be worth fighting for.
After considerable investigation, we narrowed down on several customers of our CommunityZero software that were using the software to conduct focus group research. We thought this was interesting and saw an opportunity in the market for community-based qualitative research platforms. We believed that with our experience, and our ability to work with the customers we already had to understand the customer requirements, we could develop a world class best-of-breed software to lead the space, and we set about turning the company to achieve this. However, there was still an absence of sufficient runway to effect the development of an entirely new software product and matching business model. While this is a story in itself, the short version is that I had to draw down every source of credit I could access personally, and I then used those borrowed funds to finance the business in hopes that we could save the company and one day be on to better days. It was a risky bet on the team in a very dark time. I’m not entirely sure I thought we could do it, but I felt like it was my responsibility to the great people and friends around me to do everything possible to try. Facing personal bankruptcy is a strong motivator.
Today, Ramius Corporation, renamed after the product we built and launched in 2012, to Recollective Inc. is growing at over 60% per year. Our software is offered in 26 languages and used by over 1000 of the top market research agencies and insights-led enterprises around the world. Our headcount has increased from 27 people a year ago to 50 today, and this year, revenues are anticipated to reach over $15 million. 2021 will be our sixth consecutive year of profitability. We’re moving faster than ever. The lessons of our past are being applied every day. Things are a lot more fun than they used to be - but we’re only just getting started. We stay paranoid because we’ve seen the market change on us before, but right now, the future looks very bright. Our business is stronger than ever and we’re more motivated than ever.