This week I have had the good fortune to interview Alain Raynaud, who is the founder and CEO of FairSoftware. He previously co-founded EVE-USA and was their Technical Director, in San Jose. Alain started his career in high-tech as a freelance journalist in the late 80s working for French magazines such as MacWorld.
Adam: Can you talk us through your career progression, you started out as a journalist?
Alain: I started like most geeks, coding while in high school. I sent one of my programs to a magazine and they actually published it. From there, I moved to writing about technology in my spare time. Whenever I would see a cool new technology, I would contact my editor and convince him to let me write a story on it.
Adam: Looking back on your days as a journalist and the areas that you covered what are the most spectacular changes that you have since noted in the industry?
Alain: I focused on covering really exotic stuff, that only geeks would appreciate. For instance, I really liked virtualization in the early 90s, when no one had heard about it yet. I also would cover the first Unix ports on the Mac, which definitely was a niche market at the time. It’s fun to see that good technologies eventually become mainstream, even if it sometimes takes 10 years or more.
Adam: What is your OS of choice and why?
Alain: I have been a MacOS fan forever. I am very sensitive to good, smart, usable UIs. As an engineer by trade, I also became very fluent in Unix/ Linux, so MacOS X to me gives me the best of both worlds. From the number of people using Macs at conferences such as the Open Source Conference, I am not the only one who found MacOS X to be a killer combination.
Adam: Was Eve USA your first start-up and what lessons did you take from it when you started FairSoftware?
Alain: EVE-USA was the first startup I did as a co-founder (its exact founding would be a very long and complicated story). It’s a hardware company, selling to businesses. I always wanted to go back to software and the web, where the action is. What I really learned at EVE was to respect the customer. Before, I was like many R&D engineers, thinking that sales and marketing are basically clueless overhead. When circumstances forced me to get involved with customers, I started seeing things differently. You need both business and technical people to succeed.
Adam: What are your thoughts on services such as oDesk, Elance, Freelancer and Guru.com? Do you think that start ups can make good use of them or do you think that they are exploitative and devalue the services that providers offer?
Alain: Disclaimer: in a way, FairSoftware competes with such outsourcing companies, so you have to take my opinion with a grain of salt. I am still shocked by oDesk’s invasion of privacy. The other services like elance provide decent value, but startups should not use them for strategic development. A story I can share is that in the early stages of FairSoftware, we considered using outsourcing to develop our product, but cancelled those plans after two weeks: it was taking us longer to review and coach the remote team, so we decided to do the development ourselves.
Adam: What is your business passion?
Alain: I want to help people become entrepreneurs, because I see too many bright engineers get a boring job at a big company and waste their potential. By removing all barriers, I’m hoping that everyone who should do a startup, will.
Adam: Do you think that you need to be passionate about a subject in order to make a successful career from it?
Alain: Passion is very important in startups, because rejection will be permanent. Everyone will tell you that you are wrong, that your idea is bad, etc. If you are not passionate, you’ll quit very quickly. I also have seen people, especially during the dot-com bubble, do startups because the thought it was quick money. Those people were the first to leave when it got tough, and that’s how it should be.
Adam: What is the reasoning behind FairSoftware?
Alain: The concept is really to remove a barrier to entrepreneurship. Starting a company with your friends should cost nothing and be done online within seconds. That’s what we do. The core belief is that good products come from small teams. So we invented a legal structure with virtual stock options, shared decisions, so it really looks like a small startup. It completely removes any barriers to starting a company, so we hope it helps spread entrepreneurship.
Adam: Do you think that the project has been a success so far?
Alain: We were lucky to be selected for TechCrunch50 last year, which gave us a lot of exposure. We now have a core group of followers, people that are passionate and really love what we do. On the other hand, many people still don’t have a clue what we do or why it’s helpful, so we need to work on that.
Adam: How does the business model for FairSoftware work?
Alain: A key feature of our virtual companies is that we must guarantee revenue sharing, so you know that when you join a project, you won’t get ripped off. The way we do this is by funneling the income of those projects through FairSoftware and then redistributing it. So we have the potential to charge small fees, just like credit card companies do. We feel that we didn’t want to charge anything to our users until they are making money, to keep the cost of starting companies at zero. It also aligns our goals with that of our users: have them succeed.
Adam Toren
