Sramana Mitra: Did you do shareholder communication?
Dheeraj Pandey: All the time. I like it. There was a thesis to be sold as well. After we went public is when we started to transition the business model. It probably was the biggest business model transition the IT world has ever seen – going from hardware, to software, to subscription in three years. Communication is not something you can shy away from in these things.
>>>If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.
You may have read my recent Bootstrapping to an Exit piece, where I highlighted the importance of facilitating capital-efficient startups and smaller exits, including with small chunks of investment.
In working through the current landscape of our industry, a few trends become evident:
My observation, having covered Bootstrapping for a dozen plus years, is that the industry doesn’t fully understand Bootstrapping.
According to a recent report, the global endpoint security market is projected to grow from $13.99 billion in 2021 to $24.58 billion in 2028 at 8% CAGR. The recent Russia-Ukraine war has also heightened the scare of cyber attacks globally. Endpoint security players like CrowdStrike (NASDAQ: CRWD) are expanding their offerings and partnerships to help organizations manage this growing risk.
>>>In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:
Manish discusses his various experiences with customer validation in great depth, as well as his journey from being a hard-core developer geek to a successful entrepreneur CEO who has raised multiple rounds of venture capital from top firms including Sequoia Capital.
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?
>>>In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:
Sramana Mitra: When did you reach some level of cruising altitude? What year would that be?
Dheeraj Pandey: We were still the fastest to half-billion in 2015. Along the way, there were jitters. There’s always turbulence. In 2015, there was turbulence when the Intel issue came up. They had a massive number of bugs on the server. They started to put more stuff in their folder. The Intel processor had an immense issue on the server-side.
>>>If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.
Over the last decade and more, I’ve had the privilege of working with a large number of bootstrapped entrepreneurs. These include self-financed companies and also modestly capitalized startups that operate in a capital-efficient manner applying the principles of bootstrapping. [You can take our free Bootstrapping Course to review these.]
For our Seed Capital series of podcasts and blog interviews, I’ve interviewed hundreds of investors, especially micro-VCs and angels who are playing in the early stage game.