I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I am about art and culture. In this series, I will typically publish a piece of art – one of my paintings – and I request you to spend a minute or two deeply meditating on it. I urge you to watch your feelings, thoughts, reactions to the piece, and write what comes to you, what thoughts it triggers, in the dialog area. Let us see what stimulation this interaction yields. For today – Linden Tree
Linden Tree | Sramana Mitra, 2020 | Watercolor | 18 x 24, On Paper
Sramana Mitra: What is an average deal size from your direct customers?
Paresh Patel: It’s very skewed. We have customers whose deal sizes are in the millions. We also have deal sizes that are in the hundreds or thousands. We have customers that have more than a hundred thousand machines with us. Then we have customers that are buying 50 machines. It varies quite a bit.
Sramana Mitra: Did you do another financing round?
>>>Sramana Mitra: Not only that, it addresses my next question. The enterprise CISO right now is so overwhelmed. For a startup, to get an audience with an enterprise CISO has become almost impossible. There are the known players, but that’s about it. When it comes to the new players, they have to go through somebody. Mid-market doesn’t have that level of crowdedness.
Peter Bookman: Speaking specifically for cyber security, that ended up being what we drafted into. Listening is a very important skill. Always be quick to adapt. There was an interesting gap. Mid-market and small don’t tend to have CISO’s. They can’t afford them. I could go to the enterprise, but it’s uphill. They have a lot to manage.
>>>The global subscription and billing management market is estimated to grow at 14% CAGR to reach $7.8 billion by 2025. India’s Unicorn club member, Chargebee, is a leading player in the market.
>>>Sramana Mitra: What happens next?
Paresh Patel: We started to prepare the company for scale. We had just received our Series A. We got $12 million in the bank. I first hired a COO and then a CFO. We opened up a new office. We messed up. We hired too fast and too big. Too many positions that didn’t really need to be hired for yet.
Sramana Mitra: Series A is more about how to build the product and how to sell the product.
>>>Sramana Mitra: Let’s come back to your story. Did Fusion-io go public?
Peter Bookman: It did. It was relatively smooth. A year and a half later, I left to start a virtual desktop company. That transacted again to another storage company Sandisk. I love listening to and solving a real problem. Whether we look at virtual private networks that are very prolific and common today as well as storage, they’re not in all of the cloud.
Sramana Mitra: What did you do after you left?
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Today’s 559th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, January 13, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click HERE to join. PASSWORD: startup All are welcome!