RIM acquires Tungle

Tungle announced today that has been bought by RIM. As an investor in and CFO of this company, this is big news for me. Tungle had all the right stuff and as I look back over my few years with the company there are a number of elements behind Tungle’s success that we can all learn from.

Team

Startup success begins and ends with team. Founder and CEO Marc Gingras is the complete package: technical skills, prior startup experience, and as a former VC he knew how to raise capital. His co-founder Fang Yang is a machine. He codes non stop, sets the pace and intensity for his team and is on top of the latest standards.

The team expanded over time of course. We had a clear focus on product, usability, finding and supporting users and always making Tungle better. I’m not allowed to do it of course, but I would hire many of these people into another startup in a heartbeat. All good.

Clear Problem

Tungle just made sense. Finding a time to meet is a huge pain. This may not be the sexiest, flashiest market, but it is huge. Every business person feels the pain.

Pivots

We didn’t have this term back in the early days, but Tungle sure went through some pivots. When I joined it was a peer to peer client a la Skype. And it was S-L-O-W.  The service today bears little resemblance to that early product.

Data-driven

All startups but especially SaaS startups should be data driven. Tungle was no exception to this. We even built our own custom system (known as Knudderforce) and tracked daily, weekly and monthly stats. Those stats triggered many actions, automated outreaches, etc.

Luck

All good outcomes have an element of luck. I am sure there are many examples in Tungle’s case, but the one that stands out for me is closing our Series A funding in September 2008 just as Lehman Brothers crashed and the markets started tanking. If we had been only a few weeks later we might have had a much tougher time closing the round.

Focus, focus, focus

I’ve seen many teams get distracted as they grow. The CEO is off attending conferences, the company moves from market to market, etc. Tungle was laser focused on solving its’ users’ scheduling needs. At one point we were doing usability sessions every day. We reached out to every new user. We just stayed focused.

Platform

When we first were getting started, investors wondered if this was a feature vs. a product. Fast forward a few years and it is on its way to being a full fledged scheduling platform with APIs for other companies to use.

Strategic engagement

An ideal startup for me is one that can develop conversations with potential strategic partners as a natural part of its goto market strategy. This presumes you are building something that is important to the big players and assumes that you have a CEO capable of establishing and building those relationships. This was definitely the case with Tungle and this announcement is just a logical outcome of this reality.

The icing on the cake for me is that this is an all-Canadian deal. The Tungle team will be staying in Canada and continuing to make things happen.

So, congrats to RIM and to the entire Tungle team. This is a great combination.