Sramana Mitra: The fact that you decided to go in this direction, does this have anything to do with your background in facilities management? James Litton: No. The decision to go down this path was multi-faceted. I had known Troy since the Coca Cola days. We had stayed connected. Troy had really grown up around
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. The identity space is heating up, especially because of the explosion in cloud services in the market. Ping Identity is at a $100 million annual run rate already. Read the story of Andre’s entrepreneurial journey. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey.
Sramana Mitra: You quit this job in 1990 and did something else? James Litton: I then went to work for Continental Airlines where I moved into a Systems Analyst role. This gave me experience with a very large enterprise organisation. I was in their credit management group and helped them manage their IT infrastructure. I
Sramana Mitra: This is very risky business though – trying to act venture capitalist in startups and building their products against sweat equity. That’s, business-wise, quite a risky move. Bob Witter: It’s a lot of fun. We have never had any investment dollars, so the risk is our own. We’ve taken a different approach than,
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. James has built an identity management software company from Houston and now wants to go upmarket. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of circumstances? James Litton: I am
Sramana Mitra: What does it mean when you say they distribute? Do they distribute your component or do they distribute the fully-integrated solution of these gas cylinders that have self-monitoring and self-updating capacity? Bob Witter: When we started, we were only a device provider. We helped them find the resources to build out the solution
Sramana Mitra: When did you hit upon this as a key go-to-market strategy for sourcing projects and being brought into projects? Bob Witter: It was specific to these vendors. These are the relationships that we started to build in the first couple of years of our operation. We knew a lot of these vendors through our
Sramana Mitra: Can we double-click down on what exactly happened in the first couple of years? It sounds like you started with a hypothesis and that didn’t get any traction in the market. You had to pivot. How did you figure out what to pivot to? What happened? What struck the cord? Bob Witter: We