A team with a passion, a company with a purpose …

First and foremost, welcome !

I think there is no better way to kick-off our Collibra Inside blog with a post on the reason of its existence: A team with a passion, a company with a purpose.

Going forward everyday, at a pace that seems terrifyingly fast one day to frustratingly slow the other, it’s sometimes good to look back. This post is one looking back, giving you a brief idea on the who and the why. The how is looking forward, with enough food for thought for many future posts …

Looking back on how Collibra was founded, from idea to conception to incorporation to funding, these four factors, team and company, passion and purpose, played an crucial role to get to where we are today. Its intriguing to experience how they evolve, how one empowers the other, a constant struggle to get to that perfect fit.

It all started with passion. A personal passion of each of the four of us who founded Collibra. Working together at the university proved to be the ideal breeding ground to bring our passions together, discovering the overlap, to become a team. All four founders of Collibra share a profound passion about information, meaningful information. We are not so much about harnessing the quantity (Isn’t there a company who has figured that out already ?). We are about empowering people and organizations to efficiently share and use meaningful information. This is what has lead to Collibra.

I very much agree with the saying that the culture of a company is made within the first few months of its existence. That’s why getting people on board who share our passion to build something great will be crucial to the succes or failure or Collibra. I feel lucky to be able to work with every single person of our team. Being backed by an amazing board of directors, with every member bringing his own unique expertise to the table, has already been incredibly helpful for guidance and feedback. Also the first employees to join the team amaze me regularly with their engineering talent and commitment to Collibra.

Going from team to company is another important step, one where many have failed. A team can do whatever they like. A company has responsibilities. A company needs to have a clear goal where it wants to go, needs to have a good idea how its going to get there, and, especially when it has convinced outside parties (investors, customers, partners, people, …) to commit to the company and become stakeholder, a responsibly to do whatever it can to reach these goals.

However, I wouldn’t be so heavily committed to Collibra if it was just for the purpose of building a company. The goal of where Collibra wants to go is what makes it special. As a team can lead to a company, its the passion of the team that leads to the purpose of the company. Collibra has a clear purpose, one that we think is hugely important now and in the future. One that has been tried to be solved many times before, but that is still a huge pain for any large organization. Collibra’s purpose is the following:

Collibra aims to be a leader in providing solutions to empower all stakeholders in the extended enterprise to efficiently understand, share and reuse their information assets.

This is our mission, the fundamentals of Collibra.

Now let’s build !

Felix Van de Maele,

CEO Collibra