This HBR article says we should look to China for lessons in responsiveness, improvisation, flexibility, and speed, which are the current imperatives in management. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.
Sramana: What did you do with the money that you raised in your initial round? Ricardo Villadiego: After I closed our first round in April 2010 with Progressive Capital based in Medellin, Columbia, we focused on growth in Latin America. By the end of 2010, Gartner approached us because we had picked up so many
Matthew Dornquast: That’s not enough. You have a database of consumers and you want to remind them that you have a business offering. You want to encourage them to participate in that. You need the connective tissue between your marketing systems and your enterprise sales force systems so that you will be able to recognize and
Assaf Rappaport: Let’s take an example. I’m accessing the application from my home from an unmanaged device. So end point security is not going to be relevant. I could be accessing it through a public network, Internet café, or my own private network. All your perimeters, firewall, IDS, and other good stuff that you invested in
Sramana: How many customers were involved in the early R&D and validation stage? Ricardo Villadiego: I could count the number of people on one hand. There were a maximum of 5. Sramana: That is fantastic. For an entrepreneur to get 3 to 5 solid enterprise customers for a complex system like this early on is
Sramana Mitra: I can understand why Google is doing that, but as a private company that has to make money to survive and build business value, what is the justification of being in that business of offering something for free? Matthew Dornquast: There’re a lot of benefits for the business if you know how to harness
Cloud adoption in the enterprise is opening up new security gaps. Assaf and his team have identified a major one and convinced Sequoia to concept-finance the venture. Very interesting articulation of cloud security issues facing enterprises! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as Adallom. What are you doing? What
In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: