February 9, 2006 by Teresa Riordan (permalink)
The way Steve Papa tells it, his company has survived just about everything but a plague of locusts.
Papa, B.S.E.'94, returned to campus in February to regale a near-capacity audience in the Friend Center auditorium with the trials and tribulations of building Endeca, his extraordinarily successful information technology search company.
Things started easily for the company in 1999 - perhaps too easily, according to Papa.
"It was the dot.com craze," said Papa. "We raised $1 million in three days." Soon the company had its first customer, Fidelty Investments.
But then came the dot.com crash, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and an anthrax scare that landed Endeca on national news.
It would be 13 months before Endeca got its second customer. Slowly and steadily the company built up to the 300 customers it has today, most of them federal agencies or brand-name companies like Walmart and Home Depot.
In telling the history of Endeca, Papa offered a blueprint for others embarking on new business ventures. Among his suggestions:
Papa's talk was the second in a Technology Entrepreneurship Lecture Series jointly sponsored by Princeton's Center for Innovation in Engineering Education (CIEE) in collaboration with the Jumpstart New Jersey Angel Network. J. Christopher Dries *96, *99, vice president for research and development at Sensors Unlimited, gave the first lecture of the series last November, titled "Boom, Bust, and Bounce . . . Anecdotes of Life in a Small, High-Tech Business." On May 4, the third lecture in the series will feature a panel discussion between three Princeton alums. The panelists will be Karen Drexler '81, who co-founded and served as CEO of America Medical; Jim Furnivall '80, general partner of Canaan Partners; and Kef Kasdin '85, a general partner at Battelle Ventures.