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- The Startup Velocity Question
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Bootstrapping to $45 Million from Chicago: RKON CEO Jeff Mullarkey (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: Would it be fair to say that you were able to expand your margin substantially through this process? What kind of numbers are we talking? In the kind of strategic shift that you described, what does that do to the business in terms of margin? Jeff Mullarkey: After that, we delivered a much
Scaling a Technology Company Against Major Competitors: Solix CEO Sai Gundavelli (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Sai has had to compete with competitors who were eventually acquired by HP, IBM, and their likes. How does a small company compete? Find out more. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised,
Bootstrapping to $45 Million from Chicago: RKON CEO Jeff Mullarkey (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: You started with the model of doing value-added resellers primarily. VARs are not hugely profitable businesses as you know from your previous experience as well as earlier versions of this one. Can you talk about how the business model evolved as you made this next strategic move into the cloud data center? Jeff
Bootstrapping All The Way: Infinitely Virtual CEO Adam Stern (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: In terms of the competition, when you started tinkering with virtualization in 2005, it was lesser known and everything was immature. Today, it’s mainstream and well-penetrated. What is your experience of the evolution of the competitive landscape in the market? Adam Stern: It’s mainstream in that people know what cloud means. Quite often,
Bootstrapping to $45 Million from Chicago: RKON CEO Jeff Mullarkey (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about that next inflection point. What happened? What do you think drove that? What were the strategic moves that you made to get that next level inflection? Jeff Mullarkey: It really started with us analyzing the value that clients actually got out of working with us. We were working, typically, with
Bootstrapping All The Way: Infinitely Virtual CEO Adam Stern (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Did you continue to bootstrap the company, or did you, at this point, introduce financing? Adam Stern: Early on, we financed purchases. Then we decided that from a cash flow perspective, it made a lot of sense to lease equipment. Our storage equipment, switches, and routers were leased. We only stopped leasing equipment
Bootstrapping to $45 Million from Chicago: RKON CEO Jeff Mullarkey (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: For how long did the legal business run? Jeff Mullarkey: We still work with legal today. We were predominant in legal from, I would say, mid-1998 to 2000. We expanded from there. When we started to shift our focus to security, we became non-vertical specific. We worked with everybody at that point. Sramana
Bootstrapping All The Way: Infinitely Virtual CEO Adam Stern (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit more about what was in the product. Adam Stern: In the very early days, we were focused on terminal server environments and delivering Windows virtual machines to do web and SQL-based workloads. We did offer people the flexibility of building their own environments. They couldn’t build their own virtual machines.