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HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
Bootstrapping Using Services: Bay Dynamics Co-Founders Feris Rifai and Ryan Stolte (Part 1)
Feris and Ryan wanted to work together on a new venture. They first built a services company, then introduced an OEM product, and eventually bootstrapped a product under their own brand. The company has recently raised its first venture money after many years of being in business as a profitable, growing entity. Sramana Mitra: One
Bootstrapping Using Services First, Raising Money Later: Rohyt Belani, CEO of PhishMe (Part 7)
Rohyt Belani: Then, we’ll help you analyze this. We’ve built technology to not only help with the analysis but also leverage existing security investments. If they’re using FireEye, we’re not competing with them. We actually fit along side them. Let’s say the Sandbox from FireEye, or the URL analysis product from WebSense, and take all
Bootstrapping Using Services First, Raising Money Later: Rohyt Belani, CEO of PhishMe (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: One of the things that’s obviously a huge benefit of this model is valuation. I imagine your Series A valuation is way larger than many others who would try to go raise money early. We did the story of Tableau. Tableau raised Series A at a $20 million pre-money valuation. They bootstrapped for two
Bootstrapping Using Services First, Raising Money Later: Rohyt Belani, CEO of PhishMe (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Walk us through the process of building the company. You spun the company off at what point? Did you already have clients when you spun it off? Rohyt Belani: We did. We had about 20 customers at that point. It was a tightrope walk. As you can imagine, a product company in its
Bootstrapping Using Services First, Raising Money Later: Rohyt Belani, CEO of PhishMe (Part 3)
Rohyt Belani: Just to lay it out, Farm Stone was acquired by McAfee. I worked there. Then I worked at Mandiant, which was acquired by FireEye. The group I had founded with Aaron was also acquired in 2012. Along that journey at Intrepidus, we had already come up with the product idea for founding PhishMe.
Bootstrapping Using Services First, Raising Money Later: Rohyt Belani, CEO of PhishMe (Part 2)
Rohyt Belani: Here I am on a student visa with eight weeks to go till graduation, and I was starting to scramble for a job. Then, I just ran into a job. I ran into a gentleman, literally, in the hallways of Carnegie-Mellon. I was introduced via email to him. He was an Adjunct Professor. He
Bootstrapping Using Services First, Raising Money Later: Rohyt Belani, CEO of PhishMe (Part 1)
Following up on our ‘Bootstrapping Using Services‘ and ‘Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later’ case studies, here’s the story of PhishMe, a cyber security company that has scaled nicely. 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? Rohyt
Bootstrapping Using Services: Manish Sood, CEO of Reltio (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: Why did you raise money? What was the thinking behind raising money? Manish Sood: The thinking behind raising money was that we had validated the opportunity and had substantial revenue was being generated, how do we accelerate? We are still dealing with enterprise customers. Some of these sales cycles can be long. At the