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- The Accelerator Conundrum
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Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: You basically were putting embedded code on the devices for filesystem management. Mikko Valimaki: Yes. Looking back, I think we made the right choice. We were able to grow really fast in the selected Asian market. When we were in the open source stage, I would say that from the early revenue, it
Building a SaaS Company with Operational Discipline: Betterworks CEO Kris Duggan (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Was there a segment where you were finding traction from a size point of view or any other segmentation parameter? Kris Duggan: I would say that initially when I first started the company, I thought this might be for companies that are not too big. Maybe if you’re a thousand or ten thousand
Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Can you highlight what was different in the commercial product versus the open source product? From a product positioning point of view, why would somebody who was interested in the open source product buy this one? Mikko Valimaki: I would say there are three reasons. Some of our biggest customers were very hesitant
Building a SaaS Company with Operational Discipline: Betterworks CEO Kris Duggan (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: What happened to Badgeville? Kris Duggan: It’s still going on. It’s growing and moving forward. Once you have a founding CEO replacement, there’s a lot of turmoil brought in by the CEO that was brought in. Now, they’re on to their third CEO. Those kind of challenges can be very disruptive to a
Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Were they willing to pay if you had a good website and if you had a company? Mikko Valimaki: We were able to get some of our very first money just by basically consulting and helping some of the first commercial users. For that, we improved the website a little bit. We tried
Building a SaaS Company with Operational Discipline: Betterworks CEO Kris Duggan (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What did you do after WebEx? Did you stay until when WebEx was acquired by Cisco? Kris Duggan: I left right around that time – a little after the IPO until right after the acquisition. After that, I was invited to join a DFJ-funded company to run sales globally. It was called Social
Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What year was this happening? Mikko Valimaki: This happened in 2008. Sramana Mitra: The first order of business was to get an open source product going right? Mikko Valimaki: We thought this whole thing through and we figured out that it cannot be a big enough business for us to grow this company
Building a SaaS Company with Operational Discipline: Betterworks CEO Kris Duggan (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Kleiner invested $15 million in Bettelworks on a concept. It’s an unusual financing that only experienced entrepreneurs can pull off. Read how Kris is building the company. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born,