T


his month, I spoke to Mark Hoffman, an American- born entrepreneur who has spent most of his career founding billion dollar companies right


out of the country’s tech hub, Silicon Valley. He tells Entrepreneur Country what growing up in the US taught him about being an entrepreneur, why he chose to move to the UK to work with London based firm Oxygen Finance and what he thinks British businesses could learn from the US.


Mark begins our interview by telling me about his childhood, growing up in a small town in Minnesota. “My Father ran a dry cleaning establishment and my Mom was a teacher in a one room school house. She graduated in teaching when she was 40. The village we lived in was very rural and I had a lot of independence from a young age.”


When Mark graduated from school his first port of call was West Point, named ‘The Best College in America’ by Forbes Magazine for its academic, military and physical excellence. Students are known as ‘cadets’, with tuition fully-funded by the US Army in exchange for service upon graduation.


“West Point was not just about a great education, but discipline too,” says Mark, “I got an engineering degree and then joined the military straight after.


“In the military I was running companies and was responsible for a lot of expensive equipment and most importantly people’s lives. All of those things shaped me. I spent a year in Korea in the seventies and ran a transportation headquarters company, which involved vehicle and electronic equipment repairs and running a warehouse for an Army Division.”


While WestPoint did prepare Mark for a career in the military, it was also the place in which he first began to take an interest in computers, which would shape his later career in Silicon Valley. “West Point had to be one of the first institutions that were really using computers in student instruction,” he says. “We had to do engineering projects utilising main frame computers. Then, after getting out of the military and getting my MBA at the University of Arizona, I decided I really wanted to go and work for a high tech company.”


Mark’s first job in the Valley saw him working for Amdahl, a mainframe company that was competing with IBM, who dominated the market at the time. Mark tells me it was a great learning experience. “Then the guy that hired me left to join a start-up and took me with him. It’s hard to think about it today but at that point in time we were creating relational database machines that were fast enough to finally run high performance databases, and that was cutting edge. We then spun off from that company to create the start-up company now known as Sybase. Sybase was a real inflection company for me personally and for my career. I was CEO and co-founder, and we built it from nothing to a billion dollar business. I was CEO for 11 years. It was eventually sold to SAP in 2010 for 5.2 billion dollars.”


With phenomenal success as an entrepreneur and enough 10


entrepreneurcountry


money to retire, what made Mark want to start all over again with Oxygen Finance in London? Hoffman tells me he had ‘unfinished business.’


“Another company I co-founded was CommerceOne. I had a man called David Brown working for me and many years after he left he told me about this company he was starting up in London and what he wanted to do. I said I would be interested in going on the board of the company but David wanted me to run it instead. The timing wasn’t right for me then, so I was on the board in 2012 until David spoke to me about moving to London and running the company.


“In September 2012 I called David and suggested that we get together and talk about me running the company. Out of that conversation, I decided to move to London. The technology, financial play and services were very exciting, as was the possibility of building a huge company again. It reminded me of CommerceOne and some of the things we were trying to accomplish.


“What David and I talked about was how do you get 50- 70% of buyers and suppliers to start interacting with each other in a network in a win/win manner. The answer was to incentivise buyers to offer early payment to their suppliers, but to do it with a rebate from suppliers instead of a discount. “Rebates can be recognised as revenue. We would also get world class integrators to do the implementation for free and banks to finance the gap between a 5-10 day payment to suppliers and payment of 30, 60 or 90 or more days. The way that works is we would be paying the supplier early and the buyer can pay us back in 30, 60 or 90 days, whatever they want. Then the buyer receives a rebate and we take a percentage of the transaction.


“The way this offering becomes real big is when you have something like 70% supplier participation with the buyer in these networks. No one has been able to get that kind of participation with Supply Chain Financing (SCF) or any other programme. If you can do that then that’s super exciting and it changes the world. We then began to prove out this theory where we could achieve greater buyer/supplier participation.”


Mark went on to describe Oxygen Finance as ‘a super service play into the market.’ “It’s so much more complex than just a simple ‘here’s a product, build your application or do whatever you want to do,’” he says, “We take it from beginning to end with great partners like KPMG, Mahindra and Accenture, who have come on board with us.”


With a mind-blowing track record for creating high-growth companies, what did Mark forecast for Oxygen Finance in the near future? “I think Oxygen Finance will be a huge company. We are going after are the FTSE 250 type of companies or in the US, the Fortune 500 or 1000, with billions of dollars of spend that we can help to automate.”


Now that Mark had migrated to London and was working for a financial technology start-up, as well as networking with other entrepreneurs and investors, had he made any comparisons


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60