Interviews at The Entrepreneur Center @NVTC

Many would be envious of a life traveling Europe. But Siki Giunta gave that up in 1995 when she came to work for Computer Associates in New York on its acquisition of Legent Corporation. She had been working for Legent in London and before that at Cap Gemini and IBM Corp., also in Europe. At Computer Associates, she rose to the position of senior vice president of the company’s OS/390 business unit. But four years after landing in the U.S., Giunta, who grew up in Rome, was hired to run two-year-old Managed Objects, a McLean-based company that sells business service management software. The 150-employee company is expected to announce today that it has closed on a $7 million round of venture funding, bringing its total venture backing to $50 million from investors like Lazard Technology Partners, JMI Equity Fund, and Intel Capital. The company expects to post revenue between $35 million and $40 million this year, up from the $27 million in revenue it did last year. Not bad for someone in her first CEO position. She recently spoke with Bisnow on Business about the challenge of hiring the right people and the fear of being a few thousand dollars short of making payroll.

Tania Anderson for Bisnow on Business: What are some of the best lessons you’ve learned?
If you have the right people and management team, you can win against big corporations. I have this recipe that says, ‘Happy people with happy customers bring you money.’ With this recipe you don’t have to have the best product. You have to have a good solid solution and reputation and people will make it happen.

How many people have you hired since joining Managed Objects?
In total , even the ones we released for performance, in the 230 area. Everybody gets a football jersey with a number. I'm No. 9.

What’s your strategy for hiring the right people?
If you find talent, don’t just let it go by. Go back to the team and say, ‘I found a very good person and we’ll do whatever it takes.’ You have to act fast and then you have to create an environment where people want to stay. We have 80 percent of our original team still here. I was here in October and I have people who joined 10 days after that who are still here. We have people who started right out of school and now they are in management positions.

What kind of advice would you give someone looking for a tech job right now?
Make a list of priorities of the things important to you. If job security is important to you and you think a smaller company is risky, I think you have to be very clear when you go into an interview that that’s important to you. The more flexible you are, the better the ability to get a job. Over inflating skills doesn’t help either. We always do thorough technical due diligence. You’ll be interviewed by two people with the same skill. And get customers to be your references. People you did a project with, people you supported, people who can talk about you. And remember that today people do background checks. If you have something out there, better tell it up front.

What made you take the CEO job at Managed Objects in 1999?
Two things really grabbed my attention. First of all, it was an opportunity to be a CEO. Second, it was exactly in the skills that I had. When you do something for the first time, you don’t want to go and run something that you don’t know anything about.

What’s the hardest challenge you faced in this job and how did you handle it?
The first time we were $3,000 to payroll and we were raising money. We had everything planned but it makes you realize that you’re playing with people’s lives. That was interesting in the way it gives you another dimension when you run your own company.

How was the problem solved?
We had funding lined up. We already had term sheets. But when you sign a term sheet there are normally six to nine weeks before the money gets into a bank. If you have a lot of investors and they have their lawyers and we have our lawyers, they all want to review the documents. In the end, everything worked out.

What’s the hardest part about running a tech company these days?
Differentiation is hard. Customers today will talk to anybody. You’ve got to push the opportunity beyond the talk. We really do have very good technology to the point that 70 percent of the time we go to proof of concept, we win the business.

What’s it like being one of the few women running a tech company?
As soon as you have a track record and your actions speak for you, at that point your gender is not important. I’ve never had an opportunity where I felt discriminated against. You need a very strong sense of being when you’re in a business that’s very competitive. You have to be aware of your skills. I’ve been lucky. All the opportunities I’ve wanted to take, people have given me.

You have degrees in literature, art history, French and civilization. What did you want to do with your life?
I would have gone and worked in a museum or art gallery if I could have. I realized after a couple of internships that the pace is very slow. There is a lot of time you’re just researching and understanding an artist or a moment. My first foray in work was in finance as a portfolio manager. But I couldn’t stand it. You lose the notion of what $1 million is or $500,000. Everything becomes a number. That scared me. I wanted something more fast moving and intriguing and to be able to use my language skills. People asked me if I’d tried this new thing called computing. It worked.

You speak English, Italian, French and Spanish. How often do you get to use the non-English languages?
I use Italian when I speak with my sister and we have Italian customers. French, fairly often. We have a French operation. We have Spanish customers.

What do you miss most about Italy?
I miss my cousins and my brother. I miss the farm and the seasons. I miss the food. The typical things that you would miss. I miss the sea. It’s a beautiful country. It’s a country that you can miss. I think about it every day, but this is my home now.

Any Italian restaurants here close to the real thing?
It’s hard. Italians are real picky. We have a little one in McLean called Pucinella. My sister, who’s a good cook, says it’s like home. The pizza is good. That’s the trick. If the pizza is good, normally people can cook other types of Italian dishes. :)