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- The Accelerator Conundrum
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Leveraging Amazon To Build a Cloud Storage Business: Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage (Part 4)
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
Leveraging Amazon To Build a Cloud Storage Business: Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage (Part 3)
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
Leveraging Amazon To Build a Cloud Storage Business: Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage (Part 2)
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
Building an IPO-Ready Identity Software Company from Colorado: Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity (Part 7)
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
Leveraging Amazon To Build a Cloud Storage Business: Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage (Part 1)
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
Building an IPO-Ready Identity Software Company from Colorado: Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity (Part 6)
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
Bootstrapping Using Services From Houston: Identity Automation CEO James Litton (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: So you’re trying to find a mid-market niche now where you would be able to compete with these very large players. That security and identity management space for both enterprise and mid-sized enterprises is a very crowded space. I’ll tell you what bothers me about your enterprise strategy. James Litton: There’s a couple
Building an IPO-Ready Identity Software Company from Colorado: Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Who were the customers you were going after? Were these enterprise customers? Andre Durand: We didn’t know at that time. The truth was it was big enterprises that had this problem. Sramana Mitra: Since your background was selling to bulletin board kind of people, you didn’t really have any enterprise software sales experience.