Practice English Speaking&Listening with: Flemish father of Drupal makes business in Boston, USA

Dries doesn't have the charisma or the experience of Steve Jobs, yet!

But he does own a succesful company in the USA.

Buytaert did a doctorate in Antwerp & Ghent but launched his company in Boston.

Almost immediately he was praised as enterpreneur of the year in the famous magazine "Business Week".

Nowadays Buytaert is making websites for big corporate clients such as Sony and the White House.

Greet De Keyser followed him one day in Boston

And tried to discover why this is possible in Boston and not in Belgium or, more specifically, Flanders

I had a meeting from 05:00 untill 07:00.

Then I had a breakfast with my family and following I went to the office.

Dries spends his whole day jumping from meeting to meeting because the company Acquia, founded 3 years ago, is a huge success

75 people are currently working here, next year it should be doubled.

More or less 10 years ago I started, as a student, to build a piece of software

I have released this as open source (Open Bron) software.

This means that everyone can download and use this software without having to pay license fees.

Dries gave the website a name, Drupal.

And it became a true hype with hundreds of thousands hits.

Dries became a guru for a broad internet community with dedicated members.

The famous logo Drupal, you can recognize a "Drop" in it, meanwhile is just as famous as the product itself.

Dries is famous enough in the community that he could launch Acquia, the commercial version of Drupal, without roadblocks

Acquia exists now for about 3 years.

To realize this we have been raising money from investors, about 23 million Dollar.

We have 500 enterprise clients and a whole bunch of smaller clients.

Most of our profit is coming from the enterprise clients.

Clients such as Britney Spears, Sony Music, The Belgian Royal Kingdom, New York Stock Exchange, Ted Turner and the White House.

The American government has quite some experience with Drupal and they invited me and someone else for a chat.

We had a meeting with some people, including Vivek Kundra the CIO of the United States.

That was the moment that started the ball rolling.

Dries is a geek and an entrepreneur, but foremost an entrepreneur.

The lunch comes wrapped in styrofoam and the culture of the company is typical American.

Dries says that it would not have been possible in Belgium

In 2010 he managed to fivefold the turnover.

It is quite hard to do the same in Belgium.

The size of the market, the access to funds and more is matchless.

Even Boston is not coincidence, talented people are always in the neighborhood.

MIT & Harvard are close. They are all young but very motivated and enthusiastic.

Lots of noise when a salesperson signs a new contract.

People work hard. Sometimes more than 10 hours per day.

Acquia CEO Thomas N. Erickson worked a couple of years in Europe. He'll explain why Belgium is not an option for Acquia.

The playfulness of a young company is noticable all around.

A fase that might be over quickly... The stockmarket beckons...

The introduction to the stock market could inject the company with money to conquer the European market.

Belgium did not loose Dries completely yet!

In 2011 we aim for a European office and hire various people from various countries.

Now it is easier to do this because we have a solid structure in the company.

So now we are now coming back to Europe.

And also most probably Belgium