Entrepreneur interviews

Jean-Mathieu Biseau: Over the years, we've become a leader in automotive services and warranties in the field of mobility, with two main categories: assistance and repairs. So it's quite simple, when you break down or have a problem on the side of the road, you call the little number on the windshield, which used to be on the windshield because it's no longer there, and you get a telephone tray and we send you a breakdown mechanic. We'll put you up in a hotel if you're a long way from home, or give you a rental car if you need one. In short, all the services you need to get on with your trip. So that's assistance. It's a business with 24/7 call centers. It's a business based on urgency, customer relations and empathy. Finding solutions within the framework of a contract, of course, but essentially finding solutions so that the customer can continue his journey. The second category is mechanical breakdown cover, which is a slightly complementary business, but different all the same. In this case, the aim is to take care of repairs to a vehicle that has broken down. So it's closer to "traditional" insurance, although it's different from traditional insurance, which covers repairs in the event of an accident. So we don't deal with accidents, we only deal with breakdowns, and therefore with vehicles that break down by chance, and we take care of the repairs, working with distributors and manufacturers.

Jean-Mathieu Biseau: I've been president of this company for 23 years now. Back in 2001, it was a completely different business, as it was a small subsidiary of an English group called and still called RAC, Royal Automobile Club, which specialized in automotive services and assistance. We had 50 employees, 10 million in sales, and one or two customers. It was a bit of a personal and family decision to move, since I was in Paris. I was working for car loan companies, so in a sector not very far removed from automotive services, automotive financial services. And I immediately understood that there was a way to do something, to develop it, that there was great potential. And that's what I started to do, by building a team, with a team that I recruited at that time and which, for the most part, is still here 20 years later. And so, on the important date, we did a spin-off, in 2010, but we started working on it almost two years before, at a time when one of our competitors wanted to buy us out. We suggested to our English shareholders that we should do something more clever, i.e. that we should be the ones to take over this subsidiary, this small subsidiary at the time, so that we could continue to develop it. This is what we did, by seeking investment funds. Today, we have sales of over 300 million, more than 1,000 employees and a presence in 5 European countries.

Jean-Mathieu Biseau: In 2008, we realized that there were competitors talking to our English shareholders who wanted to buy us out. So we thought we might have smarter things to do. On the other hand, even though the company was much smaller, it was still worth a certain amount of money. So we made some enquiries, went and found our first fund, which put its trust in us, and then one thing led to another, and we're now on our fourth. Each period has its own criteria, I'd say, since the company has grown a lot, with a strategy, as I said, that's fairly constant and coherent, but with challenges over the next 4 to 5 years that are always a little different. Well, the first one is really important, because a spin-off is a very tricky business. It's probably the trickiest. So you have to be sure of the fund that's with us and that's going to support us, and at the same time anticipate the reaction of the shareholder, who was very fair and cooperative at the time. It was a very good thing. And so one of the constant criteria in all these fund choices is their ability to understand our business model and our constraints.

Mike Capone: Qlik was founded in Sweden over 30 years ago as a very innovative company in the field of data analysis. When you think of the history of analytics, you probably think of the days of Business Objects, Cognos, companies like that. These solutions were interesting, but very heavy on the IT side, weren't they? You needed developers to work on them. And it wasn't really a source of autonomy for the end user. You had to make do with what you were given. In southern Sweden, in Lund, the team invented a new type of visual analysis capability based on in-memory technology. This has resulted in very fast, very powerful, but also very easy-to-use analyses. So it's all about enabling end-users to take advantage of data. And that really fueled the company for many years, until mid-2016. At that point, I know we'll talk about going public later, but at that point, we realized we had to go further. So we ended up looking at expanding our range of services for our customers. And when I talk to CEOs, chief data officers and CIOs, they keep telling me, "Analytics are great, but increasingly, my challenge is to harness all this data. I have so much data in the cloud, on-premises, in a mainframe and on social networks....

Mike Capone: Help me. Help me solve this problem. Help me extract, govern, transform and move this data more and more to modern cloud datalake capabilities like Snowflake or Databricks, and then help me analyze it." Which Qlik does really, really well. And then, of course, using Artificial Intelligence to get really good insights and results. In fact, yesterday we completed our 16th acquisition. Yes, that's right. Yes, that's right. 16th. A little company called Upsolver. But what we've really done is build a complete platform. We've gone from one feature to a complete AI and data analytics platform.

I've been working in the cloud computing field for some thirty years, starting with ADP, a major global payroll and human resources management company. My last position was that of Chief Technology Officer. In this role, my job was essentially to ensure that 50 million people were paid every payday, every week and every month. Later, I joined a company called Medidata. So I moved into the life sciences sector, using the contribution of technology for clinical trials and drug development. That's where I became interested in data and analytics, because we were using data to solve life science problems, to help bring therapies, new drugs, to market faster and more safely.

Mike Capone: My last experience, for the last seven years, was here at Qlik, working with Thoma Bravo to create this phenomenal data and analytics company.

Qlik clearly needed to transform itself, and this transformation involved moving from a software company based on perpetual, on-premise licenses to a more modern, cloud-based company, and of course moving to a more recurring revenue subscription model. This is a normal transition for companies. The problem is that in public markets, it's very difficult to do. Because every quarter, you have to explain to investors why your sales have changed, what's happened? You know but you have to explain, you have to explain revenues and pricing concepts...and then the new accounting standards came in. So there are a lot of complexities. That was one of them. And then, secondly, I wasn't there when it happened, but I know the story because I joined [Qlik] in 2018, so it was the right partnership. Thoma Bravo, a technology-focused private equity firm, they had a very compelling vision of what they could help Qlik do. The combination of those two elements made it a very, very compelling idea. And the results speak for themselves.