
Soti – A $1B firm built in a basement - ghosh
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-40504764
======
mabbo
> One problem Mr Rodrigues says the company has faced, is struggling to
> recruit enough good computer programmers.

Well yeah, he's trying to run a software business in Mississauga. As a
developer who used to commute to the 'Saug every day: very few of us want to
work there. No decent food, no after work fun, just suburb hell for miles
around.

He's competing with the banks and Amazon downtown in Toronto proper. He's also
competing with Google Waterloo 30 minutes in the other direction for people
not interested in living in the city. And he's going to be competing with them
on pay as well as location.

Edit: woo, this may be my most controversial comment ever based on the point
swings. I welcome counterpoints! Discussion is always good.

~~~
59nadir
What a world we could have if companies realized they could sidestep this
problem entirely if they hired remote workers.

~~~
IshKebab
Or paid more. Whenever companies say "there's a skills shortage" or "we can't
find enough good developers" or whatever, they are missing off the important
"... for the price that we would like to pay" part.

~~~
opportune
Exactly. Soti is paying on average $80k/year for their non-senior devs
(source:glassdoor). That's $20k/year less than the _median starting salary_ of
graduates from my undergrad. Of course, they are in Canada, but still, it's no
wonder they're having trouble hiring people. Just pay more for less
positions...

~~~
kspaans
Yes they are in Canada where they don't need their employers-sponsored health
insurance, get more vacation time, don't have huge student debt, and can't get
laid off with no severance and no notice.

~~~
opportune
Just as a rebuttal, I don't have student debt and get plenty of vacation time,
and my employer has pretty amazing health insurance. Not everyone is lucky
this way but I personally would never move _to_ Canada for a tech job and
don't know anybody who has done so, while I have definitely met many Canadians
who have moved here.

The Canadian and US labor markets are pretty interconnected so in my opinion
these companies are going to have to start raising salaries if they really
want to get talent. I feel like I read something on HN every week bemoaning
the Canadian tech industry, when most of the problems have a pretty simple
solution: pay more. Of course, that's easy to say but not necessarily easy to
do financially.

~~~
kspaans
No argument here that the jobs are more lucrative, on paper, South of the
border. Just trying to point out that there are lots of aspects to consider
when you're looking at compensation. Being young, healthy, and single in the
US can net you a lot, but I suspect that other bills would quickly eat up the
difference if you aren't all 3 of those things.

~~~
Afton
As a Canadian who moved south for work and is rapidly approaching or in middle
age, this is my position on the healthcare here: If you have good insurance,
it is AMAZING! I understand that others have it worse, but all major software
dev employers that I've looked at had really really great HI. In Canada OTOH,
the service is much worse for non-emergency things, but everyone gets to have
it. From an ethical standpoint, of course I support some kind of 'everyone
gets sensible healthcare'. But I pay less out of pocket here than I would in
Canada for my family of 5. Financially, moving back to Canada would be a
disaster.

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yitchelle
"I don't think they realised that they were talking to just one guy in a
basement, so when the person asked to speak to someone in sales I came back on
the phone with a slightly different tone."

This takes the "Fake it till you make it" mantra perfectly!

~~~
matteuan
Jared does the same in the fourth season of Silicon Valley :O

~~~
dopamean
"No, I literally eat his lunch." This was the funniest scene in the whole
series for me.

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2manyredirects
I met somebody the other day who works for a tiny start-up and said their MD
frequently hires a couple of extra actors to make the office look busier when
they have client meetings.

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jliptzin
Yet another surprising aspect of this story is that someone born in Pakistan
and now living in Canada is named Carl Rodrigues.

~~~
joaodlf
I was interested in this too, so I keep on reading and finally understood:
"Born in Pakistan to a Roman Catholic family that had its roots in the former
Portuguese colony of Goa". Rodrigues is a common Portuguese surname. Once
again, the empire strikes back :).

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zachruss92
This is a very inspiring story and the quintessential manifestation of JFDI.
It takes some serious guts to quit your job and say "i'm going to build a
software product", with no ideas to start with. I hope Carl can keep growing
Soti or even start something else once he gives the reigns to his managers.

~~~
onion2k
This is also the quintessential manifestation of survivorship bias - for every
company that succeeds there are plenty of examples of people who quit their
job, start a company and then fail after losing a pile of money, and have to
get a job again.

The important thing is to understand that and then use it to motivate yourself
to work harder on your idea.

~~~
cyberferret
That was the overriding thought in the back of my mind too, when I read the
article.

I sincerely mean "Well done" to Carl for what he has achieved, and how he did
it, but I think that more than one person who reads this article will quit
their job shortly and try and achieve the same thing to the same scale that he
did. It is still somewhat a game of chance. Nothing is guaranteed. I've been
there, and I know the scene well.

~~~
eeZah7Ux
"somewhat" a game of chance? For each garage millionaire there's ten million
penniless garage tinkerers. It's a lottery.

~~~
onion2k
_It 's a lottery._

I don't think that's a reasonable interpretation of what makes someone succeed
where others fail. There is an element of luck involved, but you can greatly
improve your chances by doing things like working hard, understanding the
problem you're solving, really talking to your customers, getting a mentor,
saying no to distractions, etc. Those things wouldn't have any impact if it
really was a lottery.

~~~
ajuc
It's a lottery with some requirements to participate.

~~~
nunobrito
Three years ago before doing a startup I would say it is more talent than
lottery.

After three years I'm bound to believe in the lottery. Sometimes those calls
do fall out of nowhere and dictate the survival or death of your company (so
was our case).

Related to this, there is a Portuguese saying: "A sorte favorece os audazes",
meaning: "Luck favors the bold ones". This was derived from the Roman empire,
so for sure there has to be some reason to stick around for so long.

~~~
opportune
I think the Latin saying is even cooler: "Fortuna favet fortibus", which is
usually translated to English as "Fortune favors the bold".

~~~
gaius
The SAS motto: Who dares, wins

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cyberferret
Amazing story. Well done Carl. I don't think I would have had the strength of
character to turn down an acquisition offer from Microsoft like he did.

Good to see a company with turnover in the $80M/yr range and still being 100%
owned by him and his wife.

~~~
sitepodmatt
That to me would be a red flag unless the pay and other comp was phenomenal.
Not talking about a facebook IPO or taking VC money, but thought train would
be forget about any equity/options the company has been going for 15yrs, $1b
turnover and thousands of staff and the owners haven't diluted any of their
shares to even reward the longest most loyal executives.

~~~
cardine
If he has no intention of selling or going public why would it matter? Even if
he was giving out equity it would have no value since there aren't going to be
any liquidation events.

To me it would be more of a red flag if he was giving away equity because he
would be giving something that he knows will never have any value.

~~~
pc86
Equity determines distributions, it's not like it's worth nothing until a
liquidation event.

~~~
cardine
This may be different in Canada, but in the US if a company is owned 100% it
makes more sense to have it taxed as an S Corp. In that case all
"distributions" are salary that is taxed as ordinary income.

This is done because even though the income tax rate is high, it is lower than
getting double taxed (paying corporate tax rates plus playing capital gains).

So generally if a company is owned 100% by one person there are no
distributions. This means for a company like this equity has virtually no
value and profit sharing is a far better deal for everyone involved.

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plg
I don't get it --- why would a supermarket chain be interested in software
that allows one to control a mobile phone from a computer?

~~~
freehunter
I don't think the BBC article really explains what Soti's software does.
Especially considering the story took place in 2001, we're talking about
Windows CE. A lot of stores and warehouses used (some still do) Windows CE
devices to scan products and manage inventory.

I'm not terribly familiar with the product, but it sounds like Soti would be
used to track all of these handheld scanners, possibly read what they're
scanning and add it to the master inventory database, let the helpdesk reboot
the device or push updates if something is malfunctioning, etc.

~~~
nunez
UPS and FedEx still use CE

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majani
Just to balance the hagiography out, the company has mostly bad reviews on
Glassdoor:

[https://www.glassdoor.ca/Reviews/SOTI-
Reviews-E156148.htm](https://www.glassdoor.ca/Reviews/SOTI-
Reviews-E156148.htm)

~~~
dsgriffin
Pretty cutting reviews even for Glassdoor, esp. the one accusing him of
writing the reviews himself (a point that wasn't addressed in the reply). As
people say, there's always two sides

~~~
majani
Situations like these make me wonder about the Asian family-centric model of
business. Many times it is touted as the way for minorities to get out of
poverty, and here it seems to be the case because him and his wife are making
out like bandits. However, it seems to be a terrible deal HR-wise where the
founder's immediate community are favoured in hiring processes, leading to
immense disgruntlement among the workers.

~~~
slice_of_life
>Many times it is touted as the way for minorities to get out of poverty

The reason it is a good approach is that; when you think about poverty, one
may go round and round in circles trying to uncover a panacea but it all comes
down to productivity. Are a group of people/is a person able to produce goods
and services? This (ability) could be hampered by a lack of skills relevant to
the current economic environment among other things. To acquire said skills
among other inputs, one requires capital. If you consume capital goods, it
won't be possible to save up enough to acquire the aforementioned production
inputs. Systems like the Asian family-centric one you mentioned earlier allows
for 1) creation of capital goods through production and 2) preservation of
capital goods through savings and reinvestment over multiple generations.

If there's capital for future generations in such a family, then acquisition
of the relevant skills in an economic environment that's constantly mutating
becomes plausible.

It starts with a sense of frugality in a bid to amalgamate capital that can be
compounded over generations in the future. Without capital generation and
preservation (by the subjects themselves in order to cultivate discipline),
you have nothing in terms of wealth creation and poverty alleviation.

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sixQuarks
This company, while impressive, was not built in a basement. It merely started
in a basement, which is way different.

That's like saying "Apple - A $700B firm built in a garage"

I'd like to know what the actual largest single-founder business is that's
being run out of a basement

~~~
dasmoth
It sounds like he was still solo in the basement when he got his first big
order. That's good enough for me.

I don't know if a literal basement was involved, but Plentyoffish was solo for
about four years and had a fair few users before hiring any staff.

~~~
sixQuarks
yeah, I think POF may take the honors. Not sure about the guy that started
Minecraft - he was also making a ton of money but not sure if he was solo.

~~~
mullen
PoF is the Unicorn of all the Unicorns. In fact, I would really call it the
Mother of all Unicorns. There is no way you can get away with comparing it to
anything and anything to it.

~~~
sixQuarks
OK, I think you're going a tad too far now

~~~
mullen
Not really. Can you name a website that sold for anywhere near $500 million
that required so little effort by the founder who was the only person working
on the website? The creator of PoF had a work week that consisted of 1 or 2
hours of work. He did not even hire a another employee for 4 or 5 years after
he started the website and the site was pulling in a million dollars a month
at that point. The amount of work he put into the website is pretty amazing
for the amount of money he got from it.

~~~
sixQuarks
well, founder of minecraft sold it for $1 billion, and he was kind of a solo
founder.

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_nedR
I am still trying to wrap my head around the idea of a Roman Catholic
Pakistani-born Canadian named Rodrigues.

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sakshyamshah
In Nepal, with 100k USD, one can rent decent office space, offer in-work
benefits/recreations and employ 15+ professionals (including tech and non-
tech), for 2 years. Yes, you can literally trade salary of 1 engineer with
entire company fund.

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pavement
tl;dr: _He [...] spent a number of years working as a consultant, before
launching Soti in 2001. [B]ack in 2001 he [...] started to try to dream up
something. [...] After a month of working[...], Mr Rodrigues had come up with
[an] idea - a software system that allowed the user to control his or her
mobile phone from their laptop. [M]ost people have never heard of the firm -
because it sells its mobile technology software systems to companies instead
of consumers_

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digitalshankar
Soti ONE platform, explained by Carl Rodrigues:

[https://youtu.be/MUXlTnFBOu8](https://youtu.be/MUXlTnFBOu8)

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Siecje
What is the use case for controlling your phone from your computer? To enforce
company policy on company phones?

Or Tech support? Like the Amazon Fire phone?

