Scaleup Q&A: SOTI CEO Carl Rodrigues on growing a global tech powerhouse through constant fine-tuning (EXCERPT)

SOTI may be the homegrown tech titan that most Canadians haven’t heard of, but other countries are paying attention. With 17,000 enterprise customers in 178 countries, the Mississauga-based provider of business-critical mobility solutions is frequently courted by world leaders, and for good reason: SOTI boasts 98 consecutive quarters of profitability, all without ever taking outside investment.

In this first interview in our series of conversations with executives of scaleup companies, CEO Carl Rodrigues explains how he built his international company by always evolving, what he does to grow his talent pool, and why Ottawa needs to catch up with what he and other Canadian scaleups are doing.

Here is an excerpt from that conversation. Read the full interview here.

RE$EARCH MONEY: You famously launched SOTI as a one-person startup in your basement. How did you initially identify the business opportunity that you wanted to pursue?

Carl Rodrigues: I could almost smell that the mobility space was going to take off at that time, and I was actually interested in it. The vision was pretty simple: Can I leverage my skills in a manner where I was really interested and passionate about what I was doing?

My thought was to see if I could create a new mobility thing that was really going to explode. The company was incorporated 1995, and I was doing consulting out of it at that time. But in 2001 I decided to try and build a product. Mobility was in its infancy. There was no iPhone, there were no Android devices. But I could see the writing on the wall, that the PDA, or personal digital assistant, was going to get melded into a feature phone, and then evolve into a smartphone. I wanted to be part of it and I wanted to build some software that I was really passionate about.

R$: So the uptake of the PDA had been enough that you could see that the market was ready for you to roll out a software solution for that device?

CR: It wasn’t that the PDA uptake was that great. It was that if the PDA merged into the phone, you wouldn’t need the PDA. Why would anybody buy any other kind of phone? Now you can have all your data with you, all your notes with you, all your apps with you, and you can make phone calls. We would be able to do this in a form that was pretty small, that you have in your pocket.

R$: It’s my understanding that you didn’t take any external financing in the beginning and never have. Why did you make that decision?

CR: What saved me again and again was my experience. By the time I started, I was in my thirties. What I’d seen was that a lot of companies had taken VC funding and the moment they came in, they started steering the company for an exit. The companies stopped being innovative because the VCs didn’t have that innovation culture. They didn’t understand what innovation was, and they didn’t have any product vision. VCs are just trying to make money. But if your motivation is just money and you don’t understand the technology, you don’t understand the market, you don’t understand the business, those guys usually screw up your company.

I saw that happening and I was acutely aware of what my success was based on. We focus on building the best, most innovative, most creative products that solve real business problems and excite our customers. That’s it. That’s what drives us. Every day we’re not really looking at the bank account and that’s what VCs do. I stayed away from them because I saw VCs as being the plague of success.

R$: Describe the ramp of taking your products internationally and growing as a global leader?

CR: Again, experience was a big factor. Right from day one, I did not focus on selling in Canada. I had no interest in selling in Canada. The reason was that I saw the U.S. as the largest unified market in the world. Culturally, it’s pretty much all the same. They speak English, I can relate to them immediately, and it’s a huge market. So I started working on the U.S. right from the beginning. One hundred percent of my customer base was in the U.S. for many years.

Even today our products are way better known in the U.S. and other parts of the world than in Canada. Again, if you want to be successful, why wouldn’t you go after the place that has the biggest market for your product? Next I wanted to go after places where I understood the culture, that were closely mapped to what I knew, which was Western Europe. So then I started to go after western Europe, starting with the UK, and then moving outwards from there.

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WANT MORE? READ THE FULL CONVERSATION WITH CARL RODRIGUES HERE.

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