MARKETPLACE: How Javier Soltero's Acompli Became Microsoft's New Outlook for Mobile

There's a persistent myth surrounding the technology industry that says successful startups tend to mirror the paths set by legendary figures like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg.

You know the story -- the genius college dropout and his friends get together, build something revolutionary, get some attention and funding, and voila! That golden ticket idea becomes a company worth hundreds of millions (a la Snapchat), or some huge tech firm pays tons of cash to bring it into the fold. The reality is much different for most. According to last year's figures from the National Venture Capital Association, 1,334 startups got funding, but only 13 percent of them either achieved an IPO or an acquisition large enough to warrant public disclosure of the price.

The story of Javier Soltero and his email startup Acompli seems to follow the mythical narrative. Acompli first appeared on iTunes in April of last year, and by December, Microsoft acquired Soltero's company and app for $200 million. By then, Acompli was all of 18 months old.

But Soltero's life and career tell a different story, one that involves far less luck and a lot more persistence, planning and know-how than what might be called "the myth of the golden-ticket startup."

Entrepreneurial Roots, Technological Talent

Originally from San Juan, you might say Soltero's first technology acquisition happened at the age of 10, when he helped his dad sell a wheel alignment machine to a small shop in the mountains of Puerto Rico.

"I come from a family of entrepreneurs," said Soltero, who told Latin Post in an email interview. Since his dad, uncles and grandfather were all enterprising individuals in the automotive business, he said, "The idea of owning a business or at least being self-employed always seemed natural to me."

"Having grown up amongst great sales people... I also knew I was pretty good at convincing people," he added. And when he was young, Soltero thought about becoming a stockbroker.

But his interest in technology started early, too. "I fell in love with computers since I saw a Timex Sinclair computer at a friends house," he said. "From that point forward, I spent a ton of time learning how to program and generally tinkering with a variety of computers."

It took a realization in the summer after his first year in college before Soltero decided to pursue a career in technology, though.

"I was hired by my uncle's company in Puerto Rico to do accounting data entry," Soltero recalled. "A few weeks into the job, the company was struggling with their internal network... I ended up figuring out how to fix the issue."

"And from that point forward, I never did any more accounting work," he said. Soltero switched his major from genetics and ended up with a B.S. in Information Systems and Industrial Management at Carnegie Mellon University.

The Value of Being a "Plumber"

Soltero's career began in the guts of the technology industry, first as a software engineer at Netscape, followed by years in the demanding but unglamorous world of tech's aptly named backend -- building IT infrastructure and management tools for software companies.

Soltero uses the term "plumber" to describe his most of his professional IT career working "in the muck of the plumbing of the Internet" and evangelizes the concept that he and his fellow Internet plumbers are now perfectly positioned to create elegant consumer apps, or "interior design," as he calls it.

For Soltero, the best software is inextricably linked to the guts of IT, especially when it comes to productivity apps like email.

As Soltero analogized, it's about "how to get the mechanical parts of the system working correctly underneath the house," while also understanding "that the average person just wants to turn on a faucet and have clean drinking water flow freely... adding beautifully designed faucets to the mix, while not forgetting that important safety valves must be included."

Soltero's First (One-Dollar) Startup

Soltero is certainly an experienced plumber, but he's also got the entrepreneurial chops that led up to Acompli.

In 2001, Soltero joined a group of other software engineers at a company called Covalent, building innovative IT management products. But Covalent began to fold in 2004, before the project Soltero and his fellow plumbers had been working on had a chance to see the light of day -- or at least a chance to be adopted by more than the total of three customers that had purchased it so far.

Soltero wasn't about to let his project languish, so he made a clever calculation. Since it was already in the hands of three customers, it was a pure liability to a company that would rather just abandon it. In that liability, Soltero saw a unique way to acquire his project -- for really cheap.

"I and four other guys went up to the Covalent board and investors and said 'We'll make you a deal. We'll give you a dollar in exchange for assuming the liabilities from these 3 existing customers and you'll give us every single bit of this IP and we'll call it a day,'" Soltero recounted in a lecture he gave about the project, which was management software for IT infrastructures of large web companies. "It was about looking for opportunity and they were, if nothing, elated at the idea that we were taking this ridiculous piece of software off their hands. We grabbed it and set off and started our own business."

That project became Soltero's first startup, Hyperic -- acquired for $1.00.

As CEO of Hyperic, Soltero was responsible for seeing the success of a product that Covalent had failed, which meant lots of hours on the phone, working hands-on with its current and potential customers, in a period of his career Soltero called "humbling."

But it paid off.

"Four of us bootstrapped for two years, from $0 to $1.2 million before taking venture funding," said Soltero, "growing the company to about $10 million in revenue, thousands of customers and 65 people." At that point, Hyperic merged with a company called SpringSource, which itself was acquired three months later by cloud software giant VMware -- for a total of $420 million.

Beyond the Backend: Acompli's Origin

Soltero worked at VMware for a few years, but left at the end of 2012. Having worked in IT his entire career, Soltero wanted to do something different, something made for the average person, and not just for other IT professionals.

"I wanted to do something I hadn't done before... build a product that an end user has to choose in order for it to be successful," he said.

At that time, Satish Dharmaraj, a kindred spirit Soltero met at VMware and former CEO of the popular email software Zimbra, recruited Soltero to an Entrepreneur in Residence position at Redpoint Ventures.

It's the place where Acompli -- the audacious, fresh take on email that would later brag that "Mobile email just got a promotion" -- would be born.

Over the course of many conversations at Redpoint, Soltero, Dharamraj and former Senior Director of R&D at VMware Kevin Henrikson began developing the outlandish notion that business email, which was seemingly destined to languish on laptops and desktops, could actually work in a primarily mobile, BYOD world.

It may sound simple, but the "plumbing" required is far from it. To be productive with work email on an iPhone screen, you need an app to be able to intelligently sort emails, search, locate and send attached files -- as well as to have an integrated calendar for scheduling meetings at a glance -- all on a tiny touchscreen. Not to mention that it would have to play well with various IT infrastructures to be useful for enterprises.

From a development perspective, it meant filling a gap in the software market that most had assumed wasn't possible to fill.

But with three experienced plumbers as co-founders with decades worth of expertise in software, IT management and entrepreneurship between them, Acompli was far from a fresh-faced "golden-ticket" startup.

In fact, it seemed calculated to succeed from the start.

Acompli's Accomplishments

 "Yep," Soltero agreed, though cautioning that he hadn't necessarily intended to sell it from the start. "Great companies are bought, not sold, so we had no intention or need to sell Acompli."

But just months after Acompli began making waves with its first publicly available iPhone app, the new Microsoft under CEO Satya Nadella took notice. "Microsoft presented us with an extraordinarily compelling offer and the opportunity to work together as one team was something we were all very excited about," Soltero said.

In December 2014, Acompli's veteran team claimed a key in the next phase of Microsoft's mobile future, for the tune of $200 million.

The acquisition was quite a victory for Soltero, who mentioned that his new employer is "a company I've admired since owning my first PC in 1987." Regarding those early days, Soltero noted, "Young Javier would be absolutely blown away by the idea that I helped build a company that Microsoft acquired."

But that's not quite where Soltero and Acompli's success story ends.

Just last week, Microsoft unveiled a new iOS version and Android preview of Outlook, Microsoft's flagship email brand, which traces back to the early '90s -- before Soltero was out of college. Outlook for iOS received incredibly positive reviews, garnering praise for its compatibility with various email accounts, its smart handling of attachments and its integrated calendar for easy, quick scheduling.