“We are hiring. So send us your CVs,” was the concluding remark of Sean Gourley, co-founder and CTO of Quid, during his keynote at Microsoft TechEd in Auckland, New Zealand yesterday.
Quid, an intelligence mapping provider, is looking to grow its talent base, and Kiwis make a great addition to the team, according to Gourley.
“There is a war for talent going on in the Valley. Everybody looks to get the best. But, any engineer comes out looking for a challenge, and not just any run-of-the-mill job. So, yes there is a war for talent there, but we are fighting one of the better fights I would say,” Gourley told Computerworld NZ.
Even as it look to hire the best Kiwi talent and take them back to the US, Gourley says that the company might look to start its own development hub in New Zealand in 2014, following a third round of funding.
“We have raised NZ$20 million with a series A and series B funding rounds. We will look to raise more through a series C that should happen from around 6 months’ to a year’s time. We are also bringing in some revenue, and our margins are quite healthy, so that puts us in a good place,” adds Gourley.
The company provides a cloud-based or on-premise solution that turns text and numerical data into intelligent maps and graphs to help decision makers. While some companies use Quid internally, others tap into it to provide services to their own customers.
“Professional services is a revenue stream that we would look to tap in to the future. We are in talks with potential clients and groups, and the trick is to work out the right price.
“We are not into data storage and we don’t want to get into that. We provide clients with the training necessary to understand the solution, use it effectively and understand the information that comes out of it. There is a huge training element that is part of the solution,” says Gourley.
The company currently has only its office at San Francisco, since most of its major clients are based out of the US. Increasingly, Quid is seeing a lot of traction for its solution in the Asian market, especially Korea.
“We are seeing a lot of growth potential coming out of Asia and lot of interest in our solution. So we will look seriously into opening an Asian concern soon to tap into those clients and service them better,” says Gourley.
While Gourley states that he does not support deep customisation of the solution, the company works closely with every client, and if a requested feature sounds interesting, then they would include it in the solution, and make it available to all customers going forward.
Quid runs off Amazon Web Services (AWS), and will eventually look to expand its backend to continue servicing customers effectively.