‘Our companies drifted apart, but we still do business together – 20 years later.’

M AT T H U F F Principal & President Redapt Inc.

A REMARKABLE STORY ‘It’s a remarkable story’, says Matt Huff. A story that started 20 years ago, when the world still felt like a big place. A time when you used faxes instead of emails. A time in which you picked up the usuallynot-mobile-phone instead of googling something. And via such an old-fashioned telephone Matt, from the American company Redapt Inc., got in touch with a certain Martijn Niessen, from a small country somewhere across the ocean. They were both young, were trading in Sun Microsystems hardware, pretty successfully, and thought it would be interesting to see if they could do business together. That they were successful – that anything was successful in those days – Matt still finds that special today. Because you only based your decisions on a telephone call, on a voice at the other end of the line. You didn’t have a clue what the other looked like, what kind of person he was. Everything was based on trust. A lot of trust for that matter, since you’d make a down payment of 20% and assume the one on the other side of the pond would deliver what he had promised. It did matter that Martijn and his colleagues were very easy to talk to. They are truly some of the nicest people you can hope to work with, he says. That made it easier to build a bond of trust, and to develop that bond further. It would be one of the reasons why Redapt Inc. set up a joint venture with Martijn, years later. Redapt

Inc. wanted to expand in Europe and the chemistry with Martijn was enormous, just like the trust. We knew they could do it, that they would pull it off. Thus, Redapt Europe was born. Man, those were the days, says Matt. Since they no longer needed to negotiate, they cooperated, together servicing the same customer. It doesn’t mean that Matt finds it difficult that Redapt Europe eventually turned into Exellyn, that Martijn chose one path and Redapt Inc. another. He says: ‘That’s the nature of things. Our companies drifted apart. The American market is unlike the European. They are very different. And that is nobody’s fault. The landscape changed, it’s as simple as that. So, we reached a point where we said: we will continue, apart from each other. A joint decision. The beauty of it is that we still honor our gentlemen’s agreement: our business structures allow us to continue doing business together. Even now, more than 20 years later. Thanks to a bond of trust that developed during these first phone calls.’ •

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