categories

HOT TOPICS

Building a Mobile Security Company in Silicon Valley: Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder and President of Appthority (Part 6)

Posted on Saturday, Sep 24th

Sramana Mitra: At what point did you make that switch from going indirect to direct? Domingo Guerra: I think it was around 2013 when we were in front of a lot more customers. We started realizing that it is a new space that’s changing very quickly. It’s difficult to train a partner to sell something that’s

Read Full Article »

Building a Mobile Security Company in Silicon Valley: Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder and President of Appthority (Part 5)

Posted on Friday, Sep 23rd

Sramana Mitra: By the time you got this term sheet, how many customers did you have? Domingo Guerra: We had about six or seven beta customers, but they weren’t paying yet. A lot of times, it’s like a chicken-and-egg thing. They want to go with you but they want you to get funding because they’re

Read Full Article »

Building a Mobile Security Company in Silicon Valley: Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder and President of Appthority (Part 4)

Posted on Thursday, Sep 22nd

Sramana Mitra: Talk to us a little bit about your fundraising process? What proof points did you go to raise money with and whom did you raise money from? What was the rational for raising money and what were the circumstances in which you raised money? Domingo Guerra: We were pretty naive about fundraising. We

Read Full Article »

Building a Mobile Security Company in Silicon Valley: Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder and President of Appthority (Part 3)

Posted on Wednesday, Sep 21st

Sramana Mitra: Who was the first customer that adopted your solution? Domingo Guerra: We had a lot of initial beta customers. Automotive companies were doing manual testing of apps, and we were helping them automate that. The first paying customer was one of the largest ad networks. When you play a game, for example, you

Read Full Article »

Building a Mobile Security Company in Silicon Valley: Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder and President of Appthority (Part 2)

Posted on Tuesday, Sep 20th

Domingo Guerra: During my MBA, I decided to focus on entrepreneurship. Santa Clara has a very flexible program and you get to pick a lot of the classes and core competencies that you want to focus on. I decided to shadow a lot of the professors there that had entrepreneurship experience. In the last semester of the program,

Read Full Article »

Building a Mobile Security Company in Silicon Valley: Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder and President of Appthority (Part 1)

Posted on Monday, Sep 19th

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Domingo came into the market at a time when his original value proposition to enterprises wasn’t that urgent. Over time, however, the mobile security challenge has grown into a critical issue, and now the company is thriving. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping Using Services: Taylor Tyng, CEO of Wiredrive (Part 6)

Posted on Sunday, Sep 18th

Sramana Mitra: With the way you’re running the business today, have you identified levers where if you just throw money at it, you’re going to grow orders of magnitude faster? Taylor Tyng: Yes. It’s actually been one of the most interesting things. The focus on the type of product that we were building was a

Read Full Article »

Building a Cutting-Edge Telecollaboration Company: John Underkoffler, CEO of Oblong Industries (Part 5)

Posted on Saturday, Sep 17th

Sramana Mitra: Where are you today from the revenue range point of view? John Underkoffler: Our revenues are now well into the respectable double digits – that’s with two commas. We’re vectoring towards an intermediate goal of a hundred million dollar run rate. The proposition that we’re working on is broad enough for it to be a very

Read Full Article »