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HOT TOPICS
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
Scaling with Angel Money Only in Canada: Joel Lessem, CEO of Firmex (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a bit about the verticals where you have good adoption. You have a horizontal platform product. What vertical is your strongest? Joel Lessem: Investment banking is 30% of our business. Sramana Mitra: What’s the next one? Joel Lessem: Law firms are 20%. Sramana Mitra: Is there any other dominant vertical?
Scaling with Angel Money Only in Canada: Joel Lessem, CEO of Firmex (Part 4)
Joel Lessem: I didn’t like the venture capital model. I sold my house to take this job. I have a wife and a child. I put too much into this to play venture casino. I’m here to make money. I don’t care how big the company is. I just want to make money and build
Scaling with Angel Money Only in Canada: Joel Lessem, CEO of Firmex (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Is this the company that we are talking about right now? Joel Lessem: Yes, I wrote the business plan 10 years ago. There was no documentation of who owned this IP. Then I had to go to the client and say, “I want to sell this to all your competitors.” I had to structure
Scaling with Angel Money Only in Canada: Joel Lessem, CEO of Firmex (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: Very quickly, how long did you work for this entrepreneur? Joel Lessem: That was a year and a half here and a year for another one. I worked for many of them. Sramana Mitra: When was the first startup that you did? Joel Lessem: The first startup I did was in 1999. Sramana
Scaling with Angel Money Only in Canada: Joel Lessem, CEO of Firmex (Part 1)
Joel is scaling a profitable company in Toronto called Firmex, and has only spent $4 million in angel money to get to almost $10 million in revenue. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Joel Lessem:
Bootstrapping Using Services First, Raising Money Later: Rohyt Belani, CEO of PhishMe (Part 7)
Rohyt Belani: Then, we’ll help you analyze this. We’ve built technology to not only help with the analysis but also leverage existing security investments. If they’re using FireEye, we’re not competing with them. We actually fit along side them. Let’s say the Sandbox from FireEye, or the URL analysis product from WebSense, and take all
Bootstrapping Using Services First, Raising Money Later: Rohyt Belani, CEO of PhishMe (Part 6)
Rohyt Belani: If you want, I can explain with a really good example in a story. Sramana Mitra: Yes, go for it. Rohyt Belani: If you think back to 2010, there was a bomb scare at Times Square. There was a Nissan Pathfinder parked right in the middle of Times Square, which is very unusual.
Bootstrapping Using Services First, Raising Money Later: Rohyt Belani, CEO of PhishMe (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: One of the things that’s obviously a huge benefit of this model is valuation. I imagine your Series A valuation is way larger than many others who would try to go raise money early. We did the story of Tableau. Tableau raised Series A at a $20 million pre-money valuation. They bootstrapped for two