JBoss' Fleury, the guy who couldn't hack it in Silicon Valley, now dismisses it
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| Marc Fleury |
There were reports recently that Oracle was offering $500M to acquire Fleury, but that the deal apparently fell apart because Fleury wanted to stay in charge. Indeed, he wants to take his baby public, and vows to mint millionaires out of his employees. The BW portrait resonates with impressions we've garnered from others who say what a character this guy is.
Here is a snippet:
Sitting in an unkempt office in a flashy Atlanta building, he downs a giant cup of coffee before dribbling Visine into red-rimmed eyes. He spits sunflower seeds in a cup as he talks about why people hate him. The old software world? They're jealous. Open-source zealots? "They probably hate me at night because they didn't have the cojones to go out and do [what I've done]."
And about his problems earlier in the valley:
...If Fleury is focused on making money, perhaps that's because he spent a few frustrating years in Silicon Valley making none. His ambitions were nearly crushed in 2001 when he and his wife, Nathalie, and their young daughter left Silicon Valley penniless after he had spent years trying to build a software hosting company called Telkel. He was disillusioned and sick of playing the Silicon Valley game: putting together a business plan and shopping it around to "snooty" venture capitalists...So he moved into his in-laws' house in Atlanta and focused on contributing to an open-source project that he and others had started in 1999, JBoss. All he wanted to do, he told his wife, was write code for free all day long...Then companies downloading JBoss software started asking him for training and support -- and offering to pay...
http://www.siliconbeat.com/cgi-bin/mt331/mt-tb.cgi/1282
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