Sramana Mitra: This is actually an interesting point because we often see entrepreneurs trying to start affiliate marketing as a side business. Did you both quit your jobs and start it full-time or did you still hold on to your prior jobs? Angie Stocklin: We kept our jobs for several years. We were toying around
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Angie and her husband have built a portfolio of e-commerce businesses using a very unusual strategy. I had a lot of fun learning about their journey, and hope you would as well. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are
Sramana Mitra: Was there any segmentation of what kinds of customers were finding your product attractive? Nelson Nahum: First of all, before the customer, I would like to tackle the question of the business model. We created a great technology. We found out that Amazon really liked what we do because it’s enterprise storage and
Sramana Mitra: You still had $3 million which you hadn’t really started building a product on. You were basically experimenting with the cloud and learning about the cloud. Nelson Nahum: Yes. I didn’t have the $3 million then. My experiments started the day after I was laid off. It took a few weeks until the
Sramana Mitra: What level of revenue did you get to before the LSI acquisition? Nelson Nahum: I think we were in the $10 million range. Sramana Mitra: How much did you sell for? Nelson Nahum: It’s confidential. It was good for most of the people. Sramana Mitra: So the bottomline is that you made some
Sramana Mitra: What is the financing history beyond that $2 million Fidelity and General Catalyst round? Andre Durand: I would say after about two years roughly, in very traditional fashion, we started raising money to fuel our growth. I think we raised about $30 million in total between 2003 and 2012. In 2013, we made
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Nelson has built an interesting enterprise storage company and one of his key strategic moves was an unusual deal with Amazon. 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
Sramana Mitra: With that General Catalyst money, you said 2006 was when you had the server? Andre Durand: 2005 was when it came out. We used the General Catalyst money, in essence, to build the first commercial product. The first one probably took us about 18 months. Sramana Mitra: When did American Express hit? Andre