Anupam Rastogi: I’ll talk about a more recent investment. They’re in the privacy space. They’re helping developers develop code that is more privacy-friendly. There are a lot of these regulations including GDPR in Europe where you need to be careful about what data is being stored, how it’s being stored and processes. Developers have to manually think about that.
This company has built a set of scanners to understand the privacy implications. That has a lot of intelligence around understanding what libraries are getting called. We co-led the seed round there. This was more in the pilot stage. We connected them to several people from our network who are close to the space, we sat through some of those meetings and got a good handle that this seemed like a wide need.
>>>Sramana Mitra: Santa Clara was the first that adopted your technology?
Timothy Menard: San Jose was first.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s go into the mechanics of how you built the company from a financial engineering point of view. The first grant was $250,000. You got a second grant because of the discussions with Santa Clara and San Jose.
>>>Janam Mehta, Partner at Campus Fund and Venture Investments at JSW Ventures, discusses the progress of the Indian startup ecosystem.
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We’ve talked about niche, proprietary e-commerce brands and how entrepreneurs are building businesses around different concepts. Founder Eric Shannon shared the story of Big Barker, a dog bed for large dogs, with me in 2017.
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?
Eric Shannon: I was born in Pennsylvania in a suburb about 45 minutes outside of Philadelphia. I went to Temple University. I was a Finance major. After school, I moved to California and took a job in banking. I hated it and was terrible at it. I had a couple of other jobs and eventually discovered the internet side of the economy. I became very attached to it. I started in that industry in 2004.

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Sramana Mitra: Can you elaborate on what it would take for you to do the concept stage? We see very few investors who do the concept stage.
Anupam Rastogi: Along with the other criteria, we are looking to see how much market development the founder has done. We come across entrepreneurs who have gone to 20 to 50 customers and they have processed that information in a structured manner. It’s not just based on just one empirical experience. It’s often based on 20 to 50 people.
>>>Sramana Mitra: Was there a customer that you had in mind?
Timothy Menard: All sides – automotive and the communities they drove in.
Sramana Mitra: How did you get the company off the ground?
Timothy Menard: I applied for a Federal Small Business Research and Innovation grant. The company started on a quarter-million grant. I was able to use a portion of that and partner with the University of California – Irvine to have a road system and students of all classifications work on this digitalization concept.
>>>