From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When you moved out in 2011, you had already transitioned from being a hardcore nerdy developer to someone experienced in sales. You had some understanding of what it takes to close enterprise deals. What happens next?

Manish Jethani: I still felt like an engineer who was trying to apply the engineering concepts to sales. The engineer in me has never left. Nothing gives me more joy than creating something. Building a product is still very thrilling.

Featured Videos

From Hardcore Techie to Unicorn Entrepreneur: Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 6 )

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.

Best of Bootstrapping: Why is Bootstrapping So Important?

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:

1. A large percentage of VCs are chasing Unicorns
2. Too much money chasing too few deals capable of delivering hyper growth bids up valuations
3. Many Death by Overfunding tragedies have emerged
4. Entrepreneurs are reacting, as Erin Griffith points out in her NY Times article: More Start-Ups Have an Unfamiliar Message for Venture Capitalists: Get Lost

My observation, having covered Bootstrapping for a dozen plus years, is that the industry doesn’t fully understand Bootstrapping.

>>>

Video FAQs

569th Roundtable Recording on March 31, 2022

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani (Part 1)

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?

570th Roundtable Recording with Anupam Rastogi, Emergent Ventures

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

From Hardcore Techie to Unicorn Entrepreneur: Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 5)

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.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping to Exit

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.

>>>