Sramana Mitra: Also, your sales cycle was already in full swing. If there are 100 customers engaged in the developing of the product, that means that as soon as the product is ready, a good percentage of those are ready to buy. If you have product–market fit, a good percentage of those are ready to buy.
Sramana Mitra: When you arrived, was the product already in place? Were they already selling? Alexandre Wentzo: Yes. The product was only in English at that time. There was a need to put in place a sales team in Europe. We trained them on the product. We were a very small company. I had to translate
Sramana Mitra: Tell me about the conditions under which you started your first company. What was that company? What was going on around that led you to that and how did you get that going? Kurt Long: I was very naive about being an entrepreneur. I was a really good software developer and had a
Sramana Mitra: Venture capitalists and even seed investors do not fund concepts. We say this to our entrepreneurs in the program all the time. You have to get to a business. You have to get to some level of validation with your product before people are willing to write big checks. Andrew Rubin: I think
Sramana Mitra: Can you tell the story of how the company was founded and develop the story fully? Alexandre Wentzo: When I joined them in the UK, they were working in Central London in a small flat. They were keen on the French market at that time because the economy was a bit better than
Alex tells the story of a bootstrapped company from London that has gone all the way to $10 million in just over 10 years and is now looking to scale further, perhaps with outside capital. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Tell us where you’re from, where you were born, raised,
Kurt has tried different permutations and combinations of bootstrapping, several of them successfully. Listen to his perspective on each of those. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Kurt Long: I was raised in Clearwater, Florida. I grew up in
Sramana Mitra: What are the nuggets of what you were going to do differently and how you were going to do them differently? Andrew Rubin: Very simply put, our industry has been dominated by hardware- and network-based solutions for over 20 years. It doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. It’s just that it was the singular approach. Our