Bootstrapping from Canada: FluidWare Co-CEO Aydin Mirzaee (Part 2)

Sramana: Did you start this company right after college?

Aydin Mirzaee: No, I actually started working at Nortel. They were a pretty big deal when I graduated in 2006. My first three months at Nortel were amazing. I was learning every day, exploring new things and ideas. After three months I learned everything I needed to know in my position, and things got boring. I was doing well and was a top performer, they gave me a team to manage and some raises, but I was not occupied to the extent that I wanted to be.

I started another company three months into working at Nortel and used nights and weekends to do that work. I would go back to the university after work because they had not disabled my student account, so I would go over there every day after work and use the super-fast Internet from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. The concept was similar to Truphone or other companies that help make long-distance cheaper.

We started that company about two months before JAJAH announced that they were releasing their international call platform. It was a very early stage company. I worked on that company for a year and a half before we shut it down. I did that from mid-2006 through the end of 2007.

We started that company and it was cool because it allowed you to call people with really low long-distance rates. Then we suddenly heard about our competitors raising $10 million in funds. I did not even know what venture capital was, so we tried to go raise some money. Being located in Ottowa is very different, and at the time it was an old-school telecom city. Things have changed since then, but the VC scene was not prepared for a company like that. People would not invest in Internet-based ideas. Had I put 100% of my effort into that company, then I probably could have been successful.

Sramana: What did you do after you shut that company down?

Aydin Mirzaee: I realized that in order to do my own company I was going to have to exit Nortel. I left in early 2008 and I was not sure exactly what I wanted to do. I had some offers from other startups, one was to be the director of marketing and the other was to become the CEO. I found that there were five or six things that I wanted to do, and I tried to do them all at the same time. That is when I settled and focused on doing one thing, which was the beginning of this company.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping from Canada: FluidWare Co-CEO Aydin Mirzaee
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