Interviews at The Entrepreneur Center @NVTC

An Interview with Justin Langseth, President and CTO, Clarabridge
May 8, 2006

Langseth, 31, already calls himself a serial entrepreneur in his young life. Technology may be one of the few industries where that’s allowed. After working at Microstrategy and helping to launch the company’s Strategy.com business during the late 1990s, the Warwick, R.I., native left to co-found Claraview, a technology consulting firm based in Falls Church, in 2001 with Microstrategy colleague Sid Banerjee. From there they got the idea to launch Clarabridge, which sells software to help companies integrate large chunks of data they want to analyze. The firm, which has about 30 employees, received $3 million in venture capital earlier this year from Boulder Ventures. The company is not quite seeing profits yet but Langseth, who has a degree from MIT, is optimistic.

Tania Anderson, for Bisnow on Business: How did you get interested in technology?
I got interested when my parents gave me a Commodore VIC-20 computer when I was 5. Within a day or so I had written a program that had filled up the memory of that computer. So we had to make an emergency run to Toys ‘R Us to buy a tape drive so I could continue programming. I got pretty good at engineering and programming and started writing software. When I was in 2nd grade they were looking for advanced enrichment activities for me to do, so I taught the VIC-20 to play Moonlight Sonata. I started getting involved in the precursor to the Internet bulletin board systems. You could use your modem on your computer to call someone else’s computer in your town and then you could send e-mail and chat. I decided to write my own bulletin board software package. In my town anybody who was cool had written their own BBS package. I sold the software as shareware around the world. I remember getting checks from far-off places like Australia.

What was your revenue?
Probably somewhere around $10,000 all together. I was going to a private high school in Rhode Island so I helped pay for some of my high school tuition. Then I started doing consulting. That’s how I paid for a lot of college.

How did you learn programming as a child?
The VIC-20 computer came with a book. I read the book and followed the instructions. It had 2K of RAM, which is probably less than what your watch has. On eBay I’ve been ordering Commodore VIC-20s and Commodore 64s, so I have a collection in my basement. They all work.

What are you doing with your recent infusion of venture capital for Clarabridge?
We’re using it for our ongoing development, marketing, and sales costs this year. We used the money to extend our marketing team pretty significantly, and we expanded our sales team.

What was your inspiration to launch Clarabridge?
The inspiration came from working with our customers on the Claraview side who seemed to have similar challenges involving unstructured data. And the desire to take unstructured data like documents, note fields, medical records, case files, and claims and integrate them with the structured data they were already analyzing in their data warehousing and business intelligence systems. We saw that a bunch of our customers on the government side, and then also on the commercial side, had those kinds of challenges in front of them. We decided to address those by building out a product which we originally built as a subsidiary of Claraview, and then spinning out a separate company in November of last year.

Who are the customers?
We have several customers in the government. We started selling the product, while it was still part of Claraview, into intelligence and regulatory groups. Those sales cycles oftentimes take six to 24 months. We’re at the proof of concept stage with several of those government agencies. We recently started selling into the commercial market. We announced last week that Lowe’s Home Improvement is a customer.

How will they use it?
Lowe’s has created almost 100,000 reports. The initial challenge is letting the users locate information that’s within their business intelligence deployment—allowing people to search using a Google-like search paradigm. Everybody has trained themselves how to use Google and nobody went to a Google class. We built a product that takes that paradigm and applies a Google-like search box on top of data warehouse/business intelligence reports.

What are your biggest challenges right now?
One challenge is trying not to get too far out ahead of what people want to do today. For example, at Strategy.com we were doing a lot of mobile alert services for consumers, advanced traffic alerts, tornado alerts and advanced financial analysis. A lot of that stuff we were doing, now five or six years later we see other companies doing now. Trying not to be too far ahead is important. Making sure we’re innovative and leading edge, but not too far ahead so people understand what we’re talking about.

What are some interesting lessons you’ve learned?
If you ask people what they want, they don’t necessarily tell you something new and innovative. But they’ll tell you something that leads you in that direction. If you hear that from enough people, then you can put the pieces together and think of what people really want. And you can figure out how that interplays with new technologies that are just coming out, and how to package those things together to address business problems.

Do you consider yourself a business person or more of an inventor?
I struggle with that. I stopped programming because I found it easier to conceptualize things and draw it out on a white board and e-mail it to other people to do it. It’s just faster to get 20 people to build stuff instead of one. I do enjoy the business side of things as well in terms of building small organizations. I joined Microstrategy when it was 100 people and saw it grow to 2,400. And I saw Strategy.com grow that from a few people to 250 people. At Claraview, we’ve grown from three to 150 or so today, and Clarabridge from one to 30.

What else do you want to do?
I enjoy this startup-through-100-200 person kind of thing. A book that I recommend to everybody I meet is “The Singularity is Near.” That book looks ahead at the next 20 to 60 years and makes some predictions on technology and the human race. Embedded in that are some interesting things about technology such as nanotechnology, biotechnology and advanced robotics. Some of my future businesses may be based on some of those ideas.

[This interview conducted by Tania Anderson for Bisnow on Business.]