Co-Founder & CEO of Metaspectral, Francis Doumet has over 10 years’ experience building software for Fortune 500 companies. Previously, Francis was CEO of Adenda, a company building next-generation messaging tools for mobile operators. Prior to this, he held the position of Product Enhancement Manager for Agilent Technologies’ robotic line. At Agilent, he succeeded in establishing the first interdisciplinary R&D group in Agilent’s robotics division, responsible for the continuous maintenance and improvement of all current robotic products. Francis also co-founded Catapult Design, a non-profit design consultancy that provides engineering support to organizations in need of socially empowering technologies. Francis has a Masters in Engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business.
What is Metaspectral all about?
Metaspectral develops technology to compress, stream, analyze, and index high-resolution spectral imagery in real-time. Today, applications dealing with high-resolution imagery either process data on board where it is captured or truncate the data before sending it to a central location for processing. This leads to suboptimal processing of the data since it involves either limited computing resources running on the edge or a reduced dataset. Metaspectral’s technology enables raw data to be sent to a central processing server with virtually no loss of information, where more powerful computing resources are available that could ever be available on the edge to essentially detect needles in a haystack.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
I met my co-founder, Migel Tissera, a few years back in a coworking space as he was preparing for a big move from Australia to Vancouver, Canada. Freshly minted with a Ph.D. in machine learning, he had this crazy idea of using AI to compress data and achieve much higher compression rates than ever before possible. We built the technology and first positioned it as a consumer product to save on cloud storage space. But we quickly transitioned to an enterprise product, one that enabled entirely new applications dealing with large amounts of data.
What was the biggest problem you encountered with your business and how did you overcome it?
In the beginning, we had a cool technology looking for a business case. A challenge we had early on was finding the right product-market fit that would allow our product to scale. There is no way around this except performing grueling cycles of customer interviews and product (re)development.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business, and what did you learn from it?
Not iterating fast enough. It is easy to get emotionally attached to a sunk cost because it took so much time and effort to bring it to market. Instead, if you start looking at the potential cost of not pursuing a new product iteration or idea on time, it usually dwarfs the sunk costs and makes it easy to relativize opportunities.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
For enterprise sales, the most precious thing is customer referrals. A single happy customer can easily lead to a dozen referrals! If you’re thinking about exponential growth factors now, that’s correct!
If you only had 1000 dollars to start a new startup, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
On marketing! I learned the hard way that the easy part is building the product. The harder part is getting people to know about your product in the first place.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
Start a business solving a problem you’ve personally experienced, or in an area in which you have deep domain expertise in.
What is your favorite quote?
Never close doors on yourself. Let the others do the closing.
That one’s from me. What I mean by it is that you’ve got to put luck on your side. Go to every industry event, every conference, email any potential customer you can think of. You never know what might come out of these actions. Sometimes, the outcomes are things you would have never expected.
How is running a tech company different than what you thought it would be?
Being a CEO is first and foremost a sales job! You sell your idea to investors, sell your vision to potential hires, and of course your product to customers. A CEO is always a startup’s first salesperson.
How can readers get in touch with you?
The easiest way to get in touch is through email, at francis@metaspectral.com. Also, feel free to ping me on LinkedIn at Francis Doumet.
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