Why would you keep running your software company after 10 or 20 years of successful progress?
Bootstrapped founders who scale their companies past $20M or $30M in revenue have plenty of choices.
They could sell their companies, but they don’t.
They could sell part of their companies, but they don’t.
They could hire someone to run their companies, but they don’t.
Because they really love what they do and the people they do it with.
In the end, succeeding in a worthy quest with a team you love is pretty much the essence of the entrepreneurial game.
Vivek Bhaskaran is the founder and CEO of QuestionPro, a bootstrapped survey and customer-experience research software platform that they have been building for more than 25 years.
Based in the Bay Area, Vivek has grown the company globally without venture capital, staying deeply involved in product and running the business as both CEO and de facto chief product officer.
As QuestionPro crossed $10M then $30M in revenue years ago, private equity firms and acquirers started calling. Vivek chose not to sell and instead kept building.
Over the years, he has completed about ten small acquisitions and expanded the platform while staying nimble as an independent company.
In this conversation, Vivek explains why having fun, liking your team, and taking some profits along the way makes it possible for founders to play the long game.
He also shares how AI is changing market research and why most AI use cases still need experimentation.
“Two things matter to me that have allowed me to be the founder and CEO for 25 years. Number one, can I wake up every day and have the same level of energy, enthusiasm, and fun? Work and fun, and everything has to be correlated at this point. There is just one life.
“Number two is the people around me. I love the team that works with me, and I hope they like working with me. These are the two things that matter to me: Am I having fun? Am I having fun with the people around me? You got one life, so can you mesh those two things together?
“Ask yourself, am I personally in the game? Do I really want to do this? If those two things are true, then I’d say keep going. How you feel, what you’re doing in the morning, how you show up all day, and then who you work with. These are not external. You control both these variables reasonably well.”
Going long helps founders avoid the “Now what? I’ll guess I’ll start another company” question after they sell their companies. Most founders start up again.
Check out this interview with Vivek Bhaskaran on the Practical Founders Podcast.
