categories
HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- 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 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
Bootstrapping Using Services First, Raising Money Later: Rohyt Belani, CEO of PhishMe (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Walk us through the process of building the company. You spun the company off at what point? Did you already have clients when you spun it off? Rohyt Belani: We did. We had about 20 customers at that point. It was a tightrope walk. As you can imagine, a product company in its
Bootstrapping Using Services First, Raising Money Later: Rohyt Belani, CEO of PhishMe (Part 3)
Rohyt Belani: Just to lay it out, Farm Stone was acquired by McAfee. I worked there. Then I worked at Mandiant, which was acquired by FireEye. The group I had founded with Aaron was also acquired in 2012. Along that journey at Intrepidus, we had already come up with the product idea for founding PhishMe.
Bootstrapping Using Services First, Raising Money Later: Rohyt Belani, CEO of PhishMe (Part 2)
Rohyt Belani: Here I am on a student visa with eight weeks to go till graduation, and I was starting to scramble for a job. Then, I just ran into a job. I ran into a gentleman, literally, in the hallways of Carnegie-Mellon. I was introduced via email to him. He was an Adjunct Professor. He