We asked Peter Reynold’s, Board Member at memoQ, how he sees the switch from Kilgray Translation Technologies to memoQ Translation Technologies.
Peter, could you please tell us what you think about the name change and help us understand why memoQ became bigger than Kilgray?
I think it’s great. I think “memoQ users have more fun!”. I will get back to this later.
When you are starting out, you want to be treated seriously. You come up with an important sounding name which gives the impression of a company which takes itself seriously. In the beginning, the few people who had heard of us knew us as Kilgray. When memoQ took off, very few people called us anything other than memoQ. I remember being at conferences when I told someone I was from Kilgray I would get a blank stare. I would add that we develop memoQ and that expression would go away as they tell me they love it and use it all the time.
The name ‘Kilgray’ was made of the letters from the founder’s surnames. The founders, István Lengyel, Balázs Kis, and Gábor Ugray did great work. Thanks! However, the ongoing dynamic that is memoQ, is much stronger. The contributions of the founders are really important but so too are the contributions from customers, the memoQ team and friends of memoQ. Kevin Lossner recently published a post where he was writing about very positive changes at memoQ and he ended with the following:
“But really, it's not about the features. It's the people. And I think that the combined quality of the team behind the creation and support of memoQ software and the superb, mutually supportive professionals in the user community remains unbeatable for a secure professional present and a promising future in #xl8.”
I agree!
What we wanted to get across with the phrase “memoQ users have more fun!” was that memoQ would be more reliable, more productive and if there was a problem we would be there. This would result in memoQ users having more time to enjoy their life. Not everything is perfect. We are a software company, and a complex software can have bugs. We have probably put more effort into being there if you have a problem than other software companies. memoQ support is available 24 hours a day on weekdays and is also available on weekends. I think the bottom line with memoQ is we are consistently working on making memoQ more reliable, more productive and our support team will be there if you have problems.
One final comment on the new name: Small ‘m’ at the beginning, big ‘Q’ at the end.
Could you share more of your experience within the company? Why did you decide join back then and how do you see the future ahead?
Alexandra and Gonzalo from the memoQ marketing team asked me to reflect on the change of the name from Kilgray to memoQ, and one of the questions they asked was why did I join the company? Gonzalo went further on this and asked: “Why Kilgray looked like a great company to invest in back then?”
It didn’t.
I had been working with Idiom until it was bought by SDL in February 2008 and pretty soon after that Kilgray got in touch and suggested we could work together. At this stage, there were five people working for Kilgray. All except one had another job which seemed to be what they lived on. They also worked with developers at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics.
There are stages in the life of every startup when they ask whether they should quit now when they still have their sanity or continue banging their head against the wall. My first meeting with my future colleagues at Kilgray was also my first time in Hungary. I think it was István Lengyel who said at that meeting, “Look, we are a bunch of geeks from Hungary. Why should anyone pay us any notice?” The other two people in the room, Gábor Ugray and Balázs Kis agreed wholeheartedly with that sentiment. My first job at Kilgray was to turn this on its head, point out the advantages we had, and create some hope.
How we became successful was by becoming much more focused, analysing our market and targeted specific sectors such as LSPs. We also consciously decided to give the impression that we are an important player in the translation technology sector. The first memoQfest conference in 2009 was when we felt we were no longer bluffing about our importance – we had arrived.
Early on with Kilgray we always dreamed big.
memoQ (formerly Kilgray) is headquartered in Gyula in the south of Hungary. There is a restaurant there called The Hamburger Bar. This restaurant was the biggest taxpayer in the city when we established the company. We dreamt of becoming bigger than The Hamburger Bar. We did this around 2010. Interestingly the restaurant is still very successful today.
We dreamt of having the top professionals in our industry working for us. When we got more specific the people we talked about were Claudia Fricke and Florian Sache who had worked for Pass Engineering, the developers of Passolo. Claudia and Florian are just some of the top professionals who have contributed to the success of memoQ.
We dreamt of being the leader in translation technology. We were also clear that this meant that our software did more to improve the productivity of our customers than any other software. One of the great things about the translation technology sector is the quality of the competition. I think we are the leader in terms of translation productivity and support is good for everyone that our competitors are always challenging us.
I would like to end this retrospective by looking forward. I believe memoQ, the company and the software are both in excellent shape now and ready to contribute a lot to the translation industry. It is a great honour that so many talented professionals buy our software and use it for much of their working day. This is very much appreciated and for our part, we will continue to look at how we can improve what we offer.
Peter Reynolds
memoQ co-CEO
