Marc Fleury, founder of JBoss, is the hero of…
..the longest “Guess who I am?” game in the history of Tech IT Easy. Congratulations to Mark (or Marc. Could that be..?) for finally coming out with the answer.
Born in 1968, Marc Fleury studied at top French engineering school Polytechnique, and then did his Ph.D. at top French research school Ecole Normale Supérieure, where he had the opportunity to spend some time at MIT as a visiting research assistant. He then probably realized research wasn’t necessarily preparing him for such an appealing future, so Marc Fleury decided to start his carrer at Sun Microsystems France as a salesman. Unlike many sales people, Marc could hack code. And since he had basically fallen in love with Sun’s Java language, he was getting better and better – and was sent to Sun Microsystems’ corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley.
Soon after, the craze began and Marc Fleury felt he too should start up a company. Based on a rather innovative for the times but, in my opinion, ways too early idea (hosting software for light clients), Telkel was the typical 1998-2001 ‘from the cradle to the grave’ start-up.
This failure proved to be a blessing for Marc Fleury who would soon discover he had learnt his stripes the hard way: the Valley had become too expensive for him, so he moved to Atlanta where his in-laws had a house. A house in which there was a garage, where his wife Nathalie and him started JBoss.
Financed by training seminars and soon VCs as well (Intel Capital, Bain Capital, Matrix Partners, and Accel Partners), JBoss was a true disruptive, low cost company in the world of Open Source. Everybody, from Jonathan Schwartz to Steve Ballmer, was commenting the successes of this rather small company in the free software industry. Indeed, from JBoss application server to the full JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (including technologies such as Apache Tomcat, JBoss Portal, Hibernate & Eclipse) suite, its software have always, and I mean it, ALWAYS, been tremendously successful.
In the beginning of April 2006, Marc Fleury sold his company to Red Hat (the open source giant and in my opinion the software company with the cleverest business model: it sells software support at the station number linear price; in other words, Red Hat applies the business model of licensing without selling software licenses – smart) at crazy multiples: 8 times 2006 revenue forecast vs. an industry average of 4. I have to say though that both the brand (surprising for such a small company) and the growth rate justify such a valuation: JBoss’s forecasts indicated a 200% revenue growth for the year 2006 compared to 2005! Bottom line: 350 million $ plain in cash + an option for 70 million $ more if Marc’s team respects its business plan for a period of time.
Who said open source was free?
FYI: I did a little research and it appears that the 4 best-known Frenchmen in the Valley are Eric Benhamou, Jean-Louis Gassée, Pierre Omidyar and.. Marc Fleury of course. Oh, by the way, Marc Fleury is a blogger.
LikeRelated posts:
- "Guess who I am?" N.5 – read the description of an entrepreneur of the IT industry and guess who this is
- 2 resolutions for 2007: visit a cluster of innovation every year & brush up my programming skills
- Study Trip to Silicon Valley / San Francisco
- Best Newsletters
- Catching up on software and entrepreneurship books
Economics, Education, Entertainment, Entrepreneurship, Europe, Finance, Globalization, Java, MNC, Organization, SME, Silicon Valley, Software, Storage, USA, Venture Capital, eBay, innovation, open-source
Hi Tiffany,
You’ll find my e-mail address as well as my Skype ID by clicking on the “About” section (Upper East side of your screen). Since you’re in France, feel free to give me a call if you like. I don’t have time to meet with you but I’d be glad to tell your parents and you more about the French educational specificities over the phone, and for free)); here it is: +33.6.87.67.00.99.