Concur

Mike Hilton and Steve Singh met at Apple in the early days of the Macintosh, where Mike led development on MacRight, a leading word processor. After leaving Apple in 1990, they partnered with development company to create a Windows version of Act, a CRM predecessor to Salesforce. Their success with Act—winning a lucrative royalty when Contact Software acquired their company and later when Symantec bought it in 1993—gave them the capital and confidence to pursue their next venture. The inspiration came from a simple observation: when they talked to salespeople about their pain points, filling out expense reports consistently ranked in the top two or three answers. "We knew how to build great software for consumers. This is an extraordinarily manual paper process, very painful for everyone, the traveler, the manager, the company," Mike recalled. "There's got to be a way to make it better."

Concur launched in 1993 from an apartment in Seattle with three founders: Mike (29), Steve (who initially stayed at Symantec to protect their royalty stream), and Raj Singh (25, Steve's brother who had deferred law school for the summer and never left). Mike and Raj worked out of Steve's apartment for the first four to five months, self-funded by Mike and Steve's royalties from Act. They built a Windows shrink-wrap product called Quick Expense, which they sold for $69 through retail channels like Egghead Software. The innovation was elegant: users would fax their company's expense report form, and Concur's software would let them fill it out in a simple checkbook-style interface that would print exactly matching their company's form. This let them insert themselves into existing workflows while automating the process for users. By the time they raised their Series A in 1994, they had built a version 1.0 product and grown to 10-15 employees.

Concur's breakthrough came through press coverage. Their head of marketing secured an interview with Wall Mossberg, the renowned Wall Street Journal technology columnist. During the demo, when Mike showed the print preview feature that replicated the user's actual expense form, Mossberg's reaction was initially silent and stoic—Mike thought he'd failed. Then Mossberg said, "You guys are so effing smart" (repeated four times) and agreed to write about the product and be a beta tester. The resulting Wall Street Journal front-page business section article became legendary: Concur sold 2,000 copies within two days. The company then invested in traditional marketing channels—reviews in PC Magazine, full-page ads in American Airlines in-flight magazines, and channel partnerships with computer software retailers. This combination of PR momentum, positive reviews, and retail distribution drove the early consumer sales to roughly $1-2 million.

Within a year of launch, Mike and the team realized the real opportunity wasn't consumers—it was corporations. They saw organic interest from companies asking if they could deploy the product across all employees and integrate it with their financial systems. So they made a courageous pivot: instead of continuing to scale a successful consumer product, they repositioned as a B2B company. They evolved the product through multiple technological iterations: a crude client-server model using email workflows (leveraging the only connected enterprise tool at the time), then an intranet model using browsers and internal web servers (launched around 1995-1996), and finally a true SaaS model starting in 1999. The intranet iteration proved transformational—they landed a 100,000-person customer who went live in one day, proving they could scale and automating massive cost savings (reducing the $30-40 manual cost of processing an expense report to single digits).

But success led to overconfidence. Concur went public in December 1998 during the dot-com boom at $12-15 per share; within months it hit $60 with a $1 billion market cap despite being unprofitable at only $40-50 million revenue. Acquisitions distracted the leadership. The company started missing quarters. Over 18 months, the stock collapsed from $60 to a low of $0.28, market cap plummeted from $1 billion to $8 million, and the company almost got delisted. The company shrank by half as employees fled a perceived sinking ship. "Really got written off for dead," Mike said. "Analysts stopped calling. Our earnings calls turned into crickets chirping."

What saved Concur was a core group of believers—founders and employees who still saw the underlying business. Leadership made two critical decisions: First, they became obsessively focused on profitability as objective "number one, two, three, four and five." Second, they chose radical transparency, inviting the entire company to listen to earnings calls and asking questions—a cultural practice that survived even through the company's subsequent boom years. Most boldly, in the early 2000s, they bet the entire company on becoming SaaS-only, a radical move when almost all revenue came from on-premise licenses. They told customers they had a multi-year sunset window but conversion was inevitable. It was an enormously risky bet—customers could have left for competitors. Instead, Concur kept virtually all customers, successfully transitioned the business from 100% on-premise, 0% SaaS in 2001 to 0% on-premise, 100% SaaS by the mid-2000s. By the late 2000s, the company was growing 25%+ annually while remaining profitable—an unusual combination that thrilled Wall Street. The company maintained 20%+ growth for over a decade before SAP acquired it for $8.3 billion in 2014, making it one of the largest SaaS exits of its era and a stunning turnaround from near-death.