Julien Sellgren is all about perseverance, so much so that last Christmas he and his team pulled several all-nighters to solve one tech problem for a single customer.
That extra effort eventually led to a major sale for the company and steered it into an entirely new market.
“One little bit of effort on one deal can translate into a huge win for the company, and I don’t think anyone else would have done that on their own,” explained the 39-year-old Sellgren. “It required the founder, the technology leader of the company, leading by example and pulling an all-nighter with the team.”
That company was Metalogix Software, which he co-founded in 2001 and directed through the development of four generations of software products for the Microsoft SharePoint eco-system.
Sellgren sold the company to a private equity firm in 2008, but stayed on as CTO until May of this year.
His passion for technology and computers dates back many years, but Sellgren said it was his dad who encouraged him to enrol in UBC’s computer science co-op program in the early 1990s.
Toward the end of his formal education, Sellgren had already started a company of his own and was taking support calls during mid-term exams.
“I would get paged in the middle of class and have to run out and answer support questions. It was stressful, but I did get a bug for the business side of technology,” he said.
In 1996, he co-founded Mindquake Software and led the company through the first Internet boom.
Unfortunately, the dot-com bubble burst at the beginning of the last decade and took Mindquake with it.
But Sellgren, never one to give up, took his lumps, dusted himself off and found a new idea to transform into a company.
“The biggest lesson I learned was that determination pays off.” •
