Sramana Mitra: Where are you now in terms of the scale of the company? Are you doing over $10 million? Gleb Budman: We’ve crossed over $10 million a year and a half ago or so. It’s still growing quickly. We now store over 150 petabytes worth of data for customers, which is about a fourth
Sramana Mitra: Content marketing is actually an extremely effective method of customer acquisition, but not everything converts. There’s content and then there’s actual conversion. The tricky thing is to make content marketing convert. There’s this brand awareness that does very well with content marketing and not in every category does content marketing convert into actual
Sramana Mitra: You talked about the first newsletter that Amit Gupta got you into and you got several thousand sign ups from that. Is there a dominant segment type of users that stores their materials on your server? Gleb Budman: It’s all sorts of people. Photographers are a large percentage because it’s completely unlimited back
Sramana Mitra: You started this in 2007? Gleb Budman: Exactly. Sramana Mitra: You self-financed it with your colleagues? Gleb Budman: We did. It was definitely a long, crazy journey. Five of us committed to a year without salary. That would be the seed round. We then had two more people who joined us. We call
Sramana Mitra: I noticed that you said solve the problem that people were not backing up data. You can create back-up opportunities. How do you solve the problem that people were not backing up data? Gleb Budman: The reason I say that what we were trying to do was solve that problem was because back-up
Sramana Mitra: What year did this acquisition happen? Gleb Budman: It happened in March 2000. Sramana Mitra: Good timing. What happens next? Gleb Budman: I worked there until it went out of business. It was going to get acquired by ComCast and I was on the team that was working to package the assets for sale.
I keep harping on sustainable growth, not growth at all cost. Gleb tells the story of his company, built block by block with sustainability in focus. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Gleb Budman:
SM: There are many classifications of big data and real time. At this point, that’s one of the reasons why there’s so much activity in the space right now. AZ: Yes. Big data can be sold to enterprises because no matter who you are, you don’t have to be a Facebook anymore to have an