Cyriac Roeding discusses selling his company for $250M, highlighting a successful exit from a startup. Watch the full video — free, no account needed.
Cyriac Roeding discusses selling his company for $250M, highlighting a successful exit from a startup. He also touches on his current involvement in investing and advising other startups.
Alejandro: Alrighty. Hello everyone, and welcome to the DealMakers show. Today we have an exciting entrepreneur, someone that has done it, been through the full cycle, and I’m sure that you’re going to find his story remarkable. So without further ado, let’s welcome our next guest today. Cyriac Roeding, welcome to the show. Cyriac Roeding: It’s great to be here. Thank you. Alejandro: So originally born in Germany. Talking about a remarkable story, you were born there, but all of a sudden, you find yourself in a town of 5,000 people. Tell us about your upbringing. Cyriac Roeding: I was born in a tiny town at the Lake of Constance in Germany in the very south. Two years into my life, my parents decided to pack up and move to a tiny place called Wertheim, which is a 5,000-people village in the middle of Germany by Frankfurt—milk from the local farmer; that kind of thing. That’s where I
lived. I always picked up the milk with a bike. Alejandro: And you got started in business very early carrying the newspaper. Cyriac Roeding: That’s true. I carried the newspaper when I was 12 years old. At 13, I upgraded from advertising flyers to newspapers, which was a bit of an upgrade. Then I talked to the company that made the newspaper and told them about what I was working on by myself, which was programming computers. Then I suddenly got a call from them saying, “You know what? I think we might need your help. Why don’t you come during your next vacation break from school and program something for us? Before I knew it, I sold my first computer program to them at age 15, which was about making the job that I had previously in a summer job obsolete by automating it with a computer in the advertising department. It worked; the job doesn’t exist anymore. Alejandro: That’s pretty
extreme. Like selling your first thing at 15 years old. Wow! That’s pretty cool. In your case, something that was pivotal too was to really get that exposure to the American culture. That happened to you during an exchange program in Austin. How was that for you? Cyriac Roeding: I was very determined on becoming an exchange student in the United States. I wanted to experience America. I told the organization that organized it that I wanted to live in the sun. I thought of California, and they did exactly what I asked them to, which was placing me in Texas in the sunshine in the southeast Texas area, a swamp area called Orange, Texas, by Beaumont. It turned out that I loved it. I had a wonderful time. I went to high school there, and I ran the school flag on Friday Night football. I was a male cheerleader. There were 7 guys and 15 girls, and I ran the school flag across the stadium. Since
then, it’s really gone downhill. It was the best job I ever had. [Laughter] Alejandro: Good stuff. In your case, you come back while still in high school. You start to work with Hewlett Packard. How was that experience? Tell us about that. Cyriac Roeding: I was going back to Germany. I had two more years of school, although I had just graduated in Texas. That was kind of tough, going back to school. I had experienced a lot in Texas with host families and changing them. My first family were alcoholics, and I found another family, a wonderful family that had no money but had a wonderful heart. To this day, they’re like my second family. Then I came back, and I was in high school, and I was itching to do something in addition, so I became a programmer for Hewlett Packard on the side. Every Wednesday after school, I went to Hewlett Packard and programmed for them as well as during the
breaks. Then I also helped an architecture firm with software technology, as well. This was all at a time when you could still be quite differentiated even as a high schooler if you knew something about software and programming. So I made full use of that. Alejandro: Your journey is very interesting because, obviously here, you had exposure to business very early on. Then you end up after university and doing a little bit of radio DJing, and all of that stuff, you end up in consulting. I have to say that some of the most remarkable entrepreneurs that I have come across are those that went at it and launched a business with that background of either consulting or perhaps investment banking or having been investors before. In your case, why consulting? Why did you go into consulting, and how do you think consulting has shaped you and also your mentality and the way that you see through
things in order to see entrepreneurship the way that you see it? Cyriac Roeding: It’s a great question. I was always interested in a lot of different things. I loved media; I loved software; I also love strategy—the idea of defining the path of an organization and helping them shape that in a substantial manner. If you are 19 years old, then what options do you have to help shape the organizations of thousands of people if not going through a path like consulting or investment banking. I thought it was an incredible thing that at age 21, I started doing consulting work when I was in Japan. I was in Tokyo for half a year. While I was in college, I did radio reporting, and I did radio DJing at night, which led me to the fact that I hardly ever—I slept half of the day because I worked at night. But then, when I came to Japan, I thought, “This is the time for me to start exploring the whole
consulting world. As a young person, you can move a lot of large stones. I joined Roland Berger, which is a European Consulting firm in Tokyo, as a summer associate kind of thing, like a freelancer. Then I came back to Germany. I joined them again for a while in the retail business. After that, I became what’s called a Summer Associate at McKinsey. I did that during the winter, the Summer Associate thing, which was funny. My first project was international. Before I knew it, I was in Texas again, believe it or not, with a German/American company that we were helping shape their future strategy. After that, I joined them again while I was writing my Master’s thesis, and I wrote it together with McKinsey about something called Creating Killer Ideas for Radical Business Growth, a new creativity framework and much, much more efficient and effective than brainstorming that McKinsey had
developed. I found it fascinating to write about a creativity framework. I ended up doing all these creativity sessions about developing radically, growth-spurring ideas for very large companies in multiple industries around the globe while I was doing my thesis for my university program. What an incredible experience! Then my first job at McKinsey when I joined them full-time after I finished my degree, my diploma, believe it or not, to help write a book. For one year, I was helping write a book about the software industry. The idea was: are there any lasting management principles in an industry where your products are obsolete after 18 months. We interviewed 100 software companies around the globe, and of course, that brought me to Silicon Valley. When I touched down here, I have to say that there’s something strange about the smell in the air here. There’s something about the pine
trees. I don’t know what it is. There’s this association I have with this place. The moment I touched down, the world smelled different; the world behaved differently; I fell in love with this place, and I knew that this was the center of innovation, and I had to be here. That happened in 1998. Then in ’99, I tried to get a permanent transfer with McKinsey to the Palo Alto office and stay here. I was very, very excited about it. But believe it or not again, three months before I moved, I quit McKinsey. Why in the world would I do that? It’s because I had always said, “If the right people and an idea I believe in show up, I will drop everything I do, and I will start a company. So we ended up staying in Munich, and I started a company out of Munich. Alejandro: 12snap. Tell us about 12snap. Obviously, your first rodeo—putting in your notice—going from the 9 to 5 to building and scaling
something, your first baby. How was that experience for you? Cyriac Roeding: It was definitely a 9 to 5 at McKinsey. I can tell you that. [Laughter] Handing in the notice was certainly a big move. We started a company in mobile, talking about mobile phones at a time when cell phones didn’t look like this. They had green screens with one line on them in black and white. It was ridiculous for us to do that. We were crazy. We did it because we believed that cell phones were going to revolutionize the world in how we interact. My first experience with mobile phones happened in Tokyo, believe it or not, in ’94. I saw cars driving around with big massive antennas on their roofs. I was wondering, “What are these people doing? Are they watching TV in their cars?” It turned out that they had mobile technology in the trunks of their cars to have a mobile phone call. The phones were mobile in the
sense that you could drive…