Taking On Microsoft And Google From India: InstaColl Founders Sumanth Raghavendra, Kaushal Cavale, And Their Mentor Sabeer Bhatia (Part 7)

SM: VCs don’t offer what you are offering Sumanth and Kaushal. Having a bridge like the one you are providing is very helpful. SB: VCs dump companies and run away. I am now buying companies that VCs have dumped.

EMC, VMWare And The Cloud

According to a recent Morgan Stanley report, technology spending is beginning to grow again. After having fallen 1.8% last year, spending is poised to increase 3.2% in the current year, suggesting a return to normal spending patterns. Analysts expect that storage equipment and virtualization software will attract a bigger portion of these funds. IDC’s Worldwide

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Taking On Microsoft And Google From India: InstaColl Founders Sumanth Raghavendra, Kaushal Cavale, And Their Mentor Sabeer Bhatia (Part 6)

SM: I really like to go-to-market strategy. Who developed it? SR and KC: The three of us together. SM: It seems that Sabeer’s role today is very active. Is that right? SR and KC: Absolutely. He has told us that the first phone call he makes when he wakes up and his last phone call

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Taking On Microsoft And Google From India: InstaColl Founders Sumanth Raghavendra, Kaushal Cavale, And Their Mentor Sabeer Bhatia (Part 5)

SM: Do you have a sense of who your 70,000 beta users are? Have you asked them why they are interested in your product? SR and KC: Most of them are people who have already tried apps such as Google Docs and are obviously not satisfied. They want a collaborative app but are not willing

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Taking On Microsoft And Google From India: InstaColl Founders Sumanth Raghavendra, Kaushal Cavale, And Their Mentor Sabeer Bhatia (Part 4)

SM: Tell me more about the architecture underpinning your product. What enables you to do what you can now do in the browser? SR and KC: We explored many options. The first thing that came to mind were plug-ins. Even though the browser is popular for HTML, there are numerous plug-ins that make a supplemental

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Taking On Microsoft And Google From India: InstaColl Founders Sumanth Raghavendra, Kaushal Cavale, And Their Mentor Sabeer Bhatia (Part 3)

SM: Back to you, Sumanth and Kaushal. Once Sabeer became your mentor and your financing partner, how did the company’s strategy evolve? SR and KC: Up to that point we were very conservative because we did not have a lot of money. We had shut down our services group completely because it didn’t make strategic

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Taking On Microsoft And Google From India: InstaColl Founders Sumanth Raghavendra, Kaushal Cavale, And Their Mentor Sabeer Bhatia (Part 2)

SM: How large did you build your service business in terms of revenue? SR and KC: At the end of five years, we were well past $1 million in an annualized run rate. We had grown the team to just under 50 people. At that point, we realized that it was as good a time

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Taking On Microsoft And Google From India: InstaColl Founders Sumanth Raghavendra, Kaushal Cavale, And Their Mentor Sabeer Bhatia (Part 1)

Kaushal Cavale and Sumanth Raghavendra are childhood friends from Bangalore and the cofounders of InstaColl. After graduating from BMS College of Engineering and the University of Phoenix (Thunderbird), respectively, they worked in technical IT positions in the United States. They returned to India in 2000 to fulfill their dreams of starting a business. In 2005,

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