chapter 19 summary
Some founders take the bootstrap road. Very few don’t raise VC funding but manage to go right through to an IPO. CEO, Ivan Teh self-funded Fusionex and took it to an IPO on AIM-UK market in 2012. His struggle was the common one faced by startup companies – how do you get customers when the company lacks a track record? Teh had to leverage his personal credibility and like other entrepreneurs work extra hard. He says, “With zero track record back then, it was tough to get customers used to dealing with the likes of Oracle or SAP to opt for Fusionex”.
Some founders take the bootstrap road. Very few don’t raise VC funding but manage to go right through to an IPO. CEO, Ivan Teh self-funded Fusionex and took it to an IPO on AIM-UK market in 2012. His struggle was the common one faced by startup companies – how do you get customers when the company lacks a track record? Teh had to leverage his personal credibility and like other entrepreneurs work extra hard. He says, “With zero track record back then, it was tough to get customers used to dealing with the likes of Oracle or SAP to opt for Fusionex”. Bootstrapping meant taking cheap flights, bunking in with friends and working off a laptop anywhere, everywhere and all the time! No deal was too small to chase down! Aggressive pricing was required to clinch the initial deals that served as reference sites. Read more about their products at www.fusionex-international.com.
ViTrox Corporation CEO and co-founder, Chu Jenn Weng studied Electrical & Electronics Engineering at Universiti Sains Malaysia. He was passionate about photography and decided to investigate the use of cameras embedded into production machinery to perform a high-speed quality inspection. For his final year project, he developed an industrial vision inspection system for part dimensional measurement. What the application does is take a real-time picture of a manufactured part using a LED. The system will automatically measure these dimensions of the LED, compare it with values stored in the system. If the measured values by the system exceeds the tolerance, the system will send a signal to the machine to reject the part accordingly. The fault can then be identified and rectified resulting without having to rely on manual visual inspection. In simple terms, no defective part gets into a product.
Chu joined HP in Malaysia, to set up and run their machine vision team. Cameras were able to replace human visuals inspections. They were more efficient, faster than humans and could be deployed early in the manufacturing cycle, improving productivity. We asked Chu about his interest in photography and he said, “After my internship at HP, I convinced my lecturers to allow me to do a project in machine vision. I continued to develop these skills and at HP, I spent five years designing machine vision inspection systems.”
> Read more about their products at www.vitrox.com.
