Trivia
Opening Quote
According to Quote Investigator, the quote "First They Ignore You, Then They Laugh at You, Then They Attack You, Then You Win" shouldn't be attributed to Gandhi. The quote has a long and interesting history.
First Employees
We didn't have an office when we hired our first employees in Belgium. We trained the first employees in our own house.
The first months, our employees had to work from home, until we bought the
Dev Shack, a small house that became the first official iText office.
© personal collection Lowagie-Willaert (see
Google Photos
for more)
The first iText Software BVBA employees (from left to right):
Garry Vleminckx,
Valérie Hillewaere,
Frank Gielen
(Spinnovation), Bruno Lowagie, Ingeborg Willaert, Michaël Demey, and
Jeroen Nouws
(March 2012).
© 2012,
An Nelissen
iText Summit 2012
In 2012, we had a first
iText Summit in Ghent
. These were the attendees:
This is Paulo Soares:
This is me:
All summit pictures are © 2012,
An Nelissen
We also made a series of videos during the summit.
Plug and Play Tech Center
These are some impressions of our
Go Global
experience at the
Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale
in 2012.
The picture on the bottom right shows me, discussing the business with
Bernard Slede.
Our office space, sponsored by IBBT:
Invoiced revenue
In those days, I used to keep an Excel sheet with all the invoices.
I kept track of the invoiced revenue of iText Software Corp. (blue)
and iText Software BVBA (orange) in a simple chart:
As far as I remember, I converted the amounts to dollars, and the Y-axis went from $0 to %1M.
11Q4 and 12Q1 were two consecutive quarters with about $900K in invoiced revenue (which is, as I
explain in my book, not the same as recognized revenue).
Visiting Adobe
This is me visiting Adobe's headquarters in San Jose for the first time.
This is Bob Wulff, giving me a tour in the Acrobat Museum at Adobe Headquarters in San Jose.
My personal Website in 2012
I switched to using Drupal for my personal website, and the first years I didn't bother searching for another skin than the default Drupal theme. That wasn't very sexy, but I had too much work with iText to look after my website. My blog was dominated by news about iText. See for instance the headlines of March 1st, 2012.
Book Quotes
- Despite the change from the MPL/LGPL to the AGPL, we had a slow start in 2010, but sales started to pick up rapidly after I quit my job in the third quarter. By the end of the year, the revenue had grown to about $700,000. In the summer of 2011, the total invoiced amount at iText Software Corp. exceeded $1 million.
We could have been happy with that result, but there was a small incident that made us question if we shouldn’t do better. - We were making money way too easily.
- I also realized that I needed a better understanding of how customers had discovered iText, what they used it for, what made them decide to become a customer, what they liked or didn’t like about it, what was missing, and so on. I would need to build a dedicated sales team instead of hiring salespeople on commission to achieve this, and by doing so, further develop the business.
Soundtrack for this Chapter
I listen to music, but my taste in music is questionable. I've selected a handful of songs for every chapters. Sometimes, there's a link to the chapter, sometimes I just like the song.
- Our House, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
- What A Difference A Day Makes Dinah Washington
- Alive, Pearl Jam
- Perfect Day, Lou Reed
- Down By The Water, PJ Harvey