Sramana Mitra: Also, your sales cycle was already in full swing. If there are 100 customers engaged in the developing of the product, that means that as soon as the product is ready, a good percentage of those are ready to buy. If you have product–market fit, a good percentage of those are ready to buy.
Sramana Mitra: Venture capitalists and even seed investors do not fund concepts. We say this to our entrepreneurs in the program all the time. You have to get to a business. You have to get to some level of validation with your product before people are willing to write big checks. Andrew Rubin: I think
Sramana Mitra: What are the nuggets of what you were going to do differently and how you were going to do them differently? Andrew Rubin: Very simply put, our industry has been dominated by hardware- and network-based solutions for over 20 years. It doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. It’s just that it was the singular approach. Our
Sramana Mitra: When you started to get this thing off the ground, anecdotally and structurally, what were the next steps? Andrew Rubin: PJ and I probably first had to figure out whether or not we like each other enough to spend more time together. I know that sounds silly now in hindsight, but when you
Sramana Mitra: What did you do in the Valley? Andrew Rubin: In every sense of the word, people talk about luck, timing, and fate being not everything, but an important part of the story. Sramana Mitra: It’s a very big thing. Andrew Rubin: It’s an incredibly important part of the story in my case. While
Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to? Andrew Rubin: It was in 1998 that I graduated from university. Sramana Mitra: How long did you work in the first job? Andrew Rubin: I stayed in my first job for under five years. Sramana Mitra: This brings us to about 2003 then? Andrew Rubin:
Concept financings are extremely rare in the industry these days, but here is a story of an entrepreneur who did raise $8 million on a concept from Andreessen Horowitz. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?