Conserving Cash: Veodia CEO Guillaume Cohen (Part 5)

SM: What else should we be talking about in your story?

GC: We now have 17 employees. We moved to a new office. We used to be in a basement in Palo Alto, and now we are in San Mateo.

SM: How much of an executive team do you have?

GC: I have a very strong team that I was able to put together. My VP of Products comes from SAP, which is very core enterprise. He also works with the user experience group.

SM: How did you find him?

GC: I met him at Office 2.0 last year. He became a friend and at some point I approached him looking for recommendations for the position. Turns out he was interested. He was a startup guy working for a big company. He was happy, but a startup environment is more natural for him.

Our VP of Engineering is the inventor of Rhapsody. He is a French guy also. He was a friend of a friend. He has been in the Valley longer than me, and had co-founded a company which became Rhapsody. I knew him personally.

A lot of the people I brought into the team were through personal connections. One of the people who started VideoLAN VLC, the open source project that is very successful and has been used in commercial projects, has joined us as well. I posted something on the VideoLAN mailing list for a consulting project. He replied, and when I was traveling in Europe I interviewed him in the airport at Munich. He was doing an internship in Germany at the time. I was coming back from a trip so I was dressed very casually. He was there with a suit and tie. I ended up hiring him and brought him over on a visa.

SM: How do you charge? What is your pricing model?

GC: It is a SaaS model which has two components. One is based on seats, depending on how many people you enable in your organization and how many people have a login on your existing platform that we plug into. We can charge on a monthly, quarterly, or on an annual basis. You can start small and if you like the technology, you can then buy more seats. It is low-risk, a WebEx model. Prove the technology and then start spreading.

When IT gets involved it is too late to go back. They embrace the technology because we make their lives easier. We also provide hooks to allow them to control things.

SM: There is some revenue already in the company, right?

GC: There is good revenue for a startup at our stage. In two and a half years we have gotten clients like Sun Microsystems that we can reference and are rolling out company wide. We also have recurring revenue, which is great. There is also a usage component. If a certain percentage of usage is exceeded, then we start charging based on bandwidth. It scales with usage.

SM: The online storage and bandwidth is on your infrastructure?

GC: Yes, everything is completely cloud-based.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Conserving Cash: Veodia CEO Guillaume Cohen
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