Towards Paperless Contracts: EchoSign CEO Jason Lemkin (Part 5)

SM: Would you synthesize what EchoSign is for us? JL: EchoSign is the simplest way for any business to get contracts signed, tracked and filed. We want to take all the pain out of paperwork and contracting, and make closing a deal on the web as simple as it is to work on WebEx or

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Towards Paperless Contracts: EchoSign CEO Jason Lemkin (Part 4)

SM: Many times I do not think VCs have any class. JL: I think people misunderstand VCs. They are financiers.

Towards Paperless Contracts: EchoSign CEO Jason Lemkin (Part 3)

SM: What were you doing while all of the drama was going on with BabyCenter? JL: I briefly worked with one of my co-founders of EchoSign at a small consulting firm. We were then helping other 1.0 companies work on some issues, and we helped some with the BabyCenter issues. We then got recruited by

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Towards Paperless Contracts: EchoSign CEO Jason Lemkin (Part 2)

SM: Let’s talk about your time at BabyCenter. When did you get involved? JL: I joined the company about a year after it was founded. I had gotten to know them as a lawyer.

Towards Paperless Contracts: EchoSign CEO Jason Lemkin (Part 1)

Jason Lemkin is CEO and co-founder of EchoSign, an electronic signature automation service. He was previously an entrepreneur-in-residence at Storm Ventures and co-founder of NanoGram Devices, Prior to his work in technology he was a corporate counsel at Venture Law Group. He earned a BA from Harvard and a JD from Berkeley. You can find his

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PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis (Part 7)

SM: In 2006 you decided to take VC money. Why then? VS: Our business got pretty big, relatively speaking. I am not an insider in that area, but we started getting calls from tier 1 VCs. I was never interested in just doing the rounds, but I figured if folks like that wanted to court

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PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis (Part 6)

SM: How did you manage to leave the OEM model as your go-to-market strategy? VS: The idea was to go straight to the customer. If you have hundreds of thousands of small customers paying you a small amount a month, it is better than one customer paying a lot at one time.

PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis (Part 5)

SM: What year did you finally become profitable after you made the transition from consulting to applications? VS: I believe it was 1997. We had the answering machine and fax. That was the core business in 1997. We were shipping worldwide and we had a good reputation.