Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 6)

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?

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Building a Mid-Market Cyber Security Company from Utah: Peter Bookman, CEO of Guard Dog (Part 5)

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.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 5)

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.

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Building a Mid-Market Cyber Security Company from Utah: Peter Bookman, CEO of Guard Dog (Part 4)

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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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The form factor of your product was that you would just clip it on a retail machine?

Paresh Patel: The design was remarkably simple. It almost works like a thumb drive. You just take the device and plug it into the machine. In three seconds, it could take that legacy machine and convert it into a modern mobile machine.

Sramana Mitra: A million and a half worth of orders were from how many customers?‘

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped from Belarus, Raised Money from Silicon Valley

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

As you know, I love stories of entrepreneurs in different parts of the world finding success through grit and creativity. PandaDoc CEO Mikita Mikado’s story gives us an insight into what’s happening in Belarus, and how he has navigated his way to Silicon Valley. Based on this conversation from 2017, our Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later mantra holds!

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

Mikita Mikado: I’m from Belarus, which is a small, former Soviet Union state on the western border of Russia. I was born in 1986. That’s about the time when things went down. My journey began there. I went to a normal Belarusian school. I was a typical Belarusian kid at that time.

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