that we embraced, and that was the software as a service trend—this idea that you could deliver all of this via the cloud, and really get companies to buy travel and expense automation without having to deal with the installation of the software and all that sort of stuff. In 2003, I’ll tell you, that was not the most popular decision. When we talked about software as a service and the idea of delivering over the Internet, a lot of analysts and Wall Street analysts said ‘this is crazy, it won’t work.’ They had a justifiable reason for saying so. There was no company out there that had really built a successful business doing it. Fortunately for us, it worked. So from 2003 to 2010, we took a business that really was doing zero dollars in software as a service revenues in 2003, and in 2009, last year, we did about $250 million in revenues.”
Our story, it’s a unique story, but it’s a pretty classic entrepreneurial story, right. You kind of work your way through some ideas. The first one doesn’t work, the second one doesn’t work, the third one doesn’t work. But you keep at it and the fourth of fifth one kind of catches. And that’s where we feel we are right now. We’re growing like crazy. Our company’s grown on a compounded annual growth rate over the last six or seven years in the neighborhood of 40 percent year over year. And we look at the future now as it relates to us delivering a whole set of mobile applications over the last year. We look at the future and think, there is a tremendous amount of really cool innovation happening in our space, that gives us an opportunity to grow from $250 million to well beyond that. And so that’s why we’re still doing it. Seventeen years later we’re all still here, and fundamentally we’re here because we have a growing business, No. 1; No. 2, we work with a bunch of people we think are fantastic; and No. 3, we’ve got this cool business problem that keeps getting more interesting.
And I know that sounds crazy because you hear ‘travel and expense reporting’ and you don’t really think it’s like the coolest thing ever, but what’s cool right now about it is this. Look at what’s happening with the cloud, with mobile devices, with social networking. And when you think about those three things, there’s one person who’s really square in the middle of all three of those things, and that’s the business traveler, the employee. We’re one of the rare companies out there that touches every single employee in every single company that we do business with. And so our capacity to leverage all three of those trends and deliver services to that employee are pretty cool. Right now, we have 10,000 customers and seven million employees who are using our software, so we’ve got some very, very interesting opportunities.
X: The company has really come a long way from that three-man operation back in 1993. How many employees do you have now?
RS: It’s a lot—it’s over 1,200 people now and it’s growing still, meaning we’re hiring people every single day. It’s funny, because sometimes we scratch our heads and say ‘where did all of these people come from?’ But you know the great part about it is we spent a bunch of time in the last seven or eight years saying we’re going to define the kind of place we want to be and the culture of the place so that the people we hire share our values. What we think is great about the place is that Concur has a very down to earth and humble vibe about a place that’s extremely, extremely aggressive. We are very aggressive about what we’re trying to achieve. We’re innovative in terms of the technology that we want to use, but we try to make sure that we have people who abide by this idea that we’re not too full of ourselves, which is hard in the technology industry!
