[Posted on October 26, 2007 - 12:35 PM]
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"If you can build it in a few weeks, someone else can too," OpenSpan Inc. CEO Francis Carden says of the ease of developing tech products these days. "But it takes a lot of time to develop a product that can't be replicated. It also takes a lot of money."Before joining OpenSpan, which makes application integration and automation software, Carden was enjoying life in retirement as an angel investor. He was flush from selling the Pixel Group, a company he founded and nourished for 13 years, for $7.3 million in cash and stock to Quovadx Inc. (which since been broken up and sold to various companies).
As an angel and active participant in Atlanta Technology Angels, he passed on lots of tech pitches. "They may have been perfectly good ideas, but they were too easy to copy," he tells me after delivering a presentation at FundingPost.com's financial technology investment conference.
Carden says it took five years to develop OpenSpan's Composite Studio, which helps corporate IT departments create custom applications that integrate disparate types of data from a range of standard desktop Windows and Java programs. Since signing on with OpenSpan in 2005, he has raised $8 million from angels and venture capital firms Matrix Parters and Sigma Partners.
- Mary Kathleen Flynn
See December 2006 story from TheDeal.com
See Francis Carden's blog
For more info on the conference, see FundingPost.com
