Farid Naib founded
Document Depository Corporation to solve a problem in his own business, and gambled that the organization of documents was a pain point for many venture capital and private equity companies. With the disappearance of physical file cabinets, DocDep, as it's better known, steps in to provide organized storage of business paperwork.
"When I sold my company to a publicly traded French firm, we were doing due diligence. We needed tax returns from Singapore from 4 or 5 years ago. We were running a pretty global operation," says Farid of his previous company FNX Limited. "We moved offices several times. Some things got misplaced; some things were in Japanese. We took a million dollar valuation hit because corporate governance didn't appear to be in place. GL TRADE, the company that acquired FNX, required a $3.5M warrant escrow. They held onto it for 3 years. For a little bit of software we could have avoided that pain."
The escrow was subsequently returned, but Naib saw a clear need.
The company, founded in 2009, is moving to new quarters at 2 Logan Circle in Center City, but rather than expanding physical space, it's contracting a bit, even as it grows in other ways. It is a fitting move for DocDep, which is all about efficiency and shrinking a business footprint to manageable size with two main revenue-generating products: Radar, for document management, and Sonar, specifically aimed at investment management for VC and PE companies and increasingly relevant in light of reforms brought about by the
Dodd-Frank Act.
"The DocDep plan for growth, now and in the future, is to continue expanding sales by consistently adding functionality and developing our products," says Naib, who is busy at work planning the company's next release to follow SmartCap, the free online cap table tool released in February of this year. "It will be a variation of the products we already offer; we will be developing an app that will cater to the High Net Worth Individual. Just the like our apps we are currently offering, it will assist in the organization and management of critical information. This High Net Worth Individual app will focus on managing personal investments and real estate, and organizing important information such as wills, trusts, and financials. "
Naib is also spending less time at DocDep HQ since he became an operating partner at
LLR Partners, a growth private equity firm based at the Cira Center. He says has no plans at this point to sell DocDep.
Source: Farid Naib, DocDep
Writer: Sue Spolan