Sramana Mitra: In the 2012 to 2014 period, you were operating with a very healthy profit margin. How many people were in the company and how did it grow? Jason Westland: That’s why it was so profitable. We had no marketing team at that time. It was just me. We had two full-time developers. We
Sramana Mitra: A bit of question about your sales cycle. At 2014, you’ve been in the market for a couple of years. You’ve got good reference customers. How did the sales cycle evolve? Janet Kosloff: It definitely got easier to get appointments as we got some recognition and references within companies. If we would get
Sramana Mitra: In 2015, your entire strategy was focused on Australia, China, and UK? Jon Ellis: It was. It was until we had our A round funding. Sramana Mitra: I was actually coming to that. You raised money in 2015? Jon Ellis: Yes, in the middle of 2015. Sramana Mitra: Tell me about that. Jon
Last summer, I was invited to spend half a day with ~40 Fortune 500 Chief Innovation Officers at Xerox PARC, and discuss our experience with corporate innovation methodology through the 1M/1M Incubator In A Box program. A few months later, Jim Euchner, the CIO of Goodyear, interviewed me for the Research-Technology Management journal. It’s a comprehensive discussion
Sramana Mitra: You said you started the company at about 2008 around the financial crisis. It took you nine months to get the first product out. The first product didn’t work. Can you put this in a timeline on when the traction actually started? Jason Westland: It actually started in January 2010. We had, what
Sramana Mitra: When 2012 ended, what kind of revenue level did you get to? Janet Kosloff: At the end of 2012, we ended up with about a million dollars in sales. That was our first full year in business. At that time, we ended up raising our small venture round. Sramana Mitra: With which firm?
Sramana Mitra: Great milestone. By the end of that year, you got the full $1.7 million in seed investment from your backers? Jon Ellis: Correct. Next, what fundamentally changed the game was that we realized that there was a network effect. The agents on our platform looking for stock in Australia were also interested in
Sramana Mitra: What about money? Hiring high-level people costs money. Jason Westland: It does. I sold my first business. My second business was sold shortly after that. I invested all of the money from those two businesses. I then went and mortgaged the house. My mom mortgaged her house. I took out some credit card