Twin Brothers Building a FinTech Venture: Stephen Roche and Gabino Roche, CoFounders of Saphyre (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about the customer progress from 2017 to 2022. You had five years’ worth of customer development that has happened. Tell me about who those customers were, what were the average deal sizes, and at what pace were they coming in.

Stephen Roche: The revenue didn’t start coming in till 2020. In 2020, we had close to 20 to 25 firms working with us on some form of proof of concept. A lot of times, we were just giving the service for free to give confidence. Most of the firms wanted other people to use it. JP Morgan was one of the firsts.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yanev Suissa, Managing Partner and Founder at SineWave Ventures (Part 4)

Yanev Suissa: We are also very comfortable going deep on the vertical side of things rather than just horizontally. You could build multi-billion dollar businesses in verticals that aren’t as familiar to the Valley sometimes like agriculture. Climate tech is one of those verticals that has emerged. Insurance is one a lot of people talk about. Manufacturing is another one. Those are areas where the Valley is not as well plugged in or connected.

Cloud Agronomics, for example, is a vertical company up and down the AgTech stack. They can help you analyze soil and agriculture over billions of acres in real-time. They can help you understand the carbon sequestration in your particular land. They are able to do a lot of things in one particular vertical well.

592nd Roundtable for Entrepreneurs Starting NOW: Live Tweeting by @1Mby1M

Today’s 592nd FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, September 29, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. CLICK HERE to join. PASSWORD: startup  All are welcome!

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped First, Then Scaled with VC Funds

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

When we spoke in 2019, Faction Founder Luke Norris had executed a tremendously effective Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later strategy from Colorado.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Luke Norris: I was born in Nevada. 

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592nd Roundtable for Entrepreneurs Starting in 30 Minutes: Live Tweeting by @1Mby1M

Today’s 592nd FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable for Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, September 29, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. CLICK HERE to join. PASSWORD: startup  All are welcome!

Cloud Stocks: Backblaze Builds out a Partner Program

According to a recent market report, the global Cloud Storage Market is expected to grow at 18% CAGR from $77.5 billion in 2021 to $208.1 billion by 2028. San Mateo-based Backblaze (Nasdaq: BLZE) is a rapidly growing player in the market.

Twin Brothers Building a FinTech Venture: Stephen Roche and Gabino Roche, CoFounders of Saphyre (Part 4)

Gabino Roche: We also got ideas. There was some nomenclature we would encounter along the way. We had to come up with intelligent ways without the client knowing what we were trying to do. They had to see words the way they understood them. We had to create a smart way of mapping that data. That is what we did, but we didn’t have a working product.

We officially started in May 2017. It wasn’t until the end of September that we had a product that we could get tested. It was not ready for production; it was just for testing. I knew I was going to run out of my brother’s money at this point.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yanev Suissa, Managing Partner and Founder at SineWave Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: India has been incredibly productive. Europe has started producing interesting companies. They want global customers and they want to set up shop in the US. European firms often prefer the East Coast. Is that a model that you are okay with?

Yanev Suissa: Oh yes. We’ve never been a five-minute-away firm. I grew up at NEA as a VC. We were always bi-coastal. It is the reality of the VC world. I do think you’re right about seeing the development teams being built elsewhere and more of the business and sales teams being in the US. I’ve seen that quite a bit.