1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Seksom Suriyapa, Partner at Upfront Ventures (Part 1)

Seksom Suriyapa, Partner at Upfront Ventures, and formerly Head of Corp Dev at Twitter, SuccessFactors, and McAfee and Akamai discusses exit strategy from the buy-side perspective at length.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you talk a little bit about your background in corp dev doing acquisitions from the buy side from various significant companies before you switched to the venture side.

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Catching Up On Readings: Top Strategic Tech Trends 2022

This eBook from Gartner looks at the top 12 strategic technology trends and why they are valuable in delivering growth, digitization, and efficiency. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Building a Mid-Market Cyber Security Company from Utah: Peter Bookman, CEO of Guard Dog (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In that funnel, you’re leading with audits?

Peter Bookman: Often. When you know the consultants are saying, “It’s $25,000 to come in and take my laptop and walk through your halls. I’m going to connect to your network and produce a report that you’re going to do something with.” The report is going to create a risk profile without a score.

If you happen to be doing that, we can come and, for a fraction of the cost, we can provide that same information and also semi real-time. You can get that same visibility and one more important thing, which is the ability to interrupt an attempted exploit. Whether that’s us, MSP, or a CISO, that’s very dependent on the organization. Each one has its own preferred means of escalation and dealing with things.

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559th Roundtable Recording on January 13, 2022

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

Roundtable Recap: January 13 – Consumer Data Privacy Discussion

During this week’s roundtable, we had a wonderful discussion on a Consumer Data Privacy startup idea.

DaXlens

Krishna Katragadda from Dublin, California, pitched Daxlens, a company focused on giving consumers better control over their data.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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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?

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.