As you may know, we just launched a book called Billion Dollar Companies profiling the journeys of entrepreneurs building massive businesses. Edmunds.com may just be another unicorn. Sramana Mitra: Where does your journey begin? Where are you from? Where were you raised and in what kind of circumstances? Avi Steinlauf: Originally, I was born in
Sramana Mitra: What is at the heart of that? What do you think is the core competency that you’ve built in your product that is enabling you to branch out into upsell opportunities in the enterprise and even work yourself into additional use cases? Praful Saklani: There’s a couple of things. First of all, I
Sramana Mitra: So far, what you’ve done is domain acquisitions. The three acquisitions you talked about are domain acquisitions. While they are high numbers for domains, relatively speaking, they are small numbers. You could also grow fast by acquiring a business, not just domains? Is that something that you would consider? Tom Fallenstein: Yes, that’s
Sramana Mitra: Do you have to deploy any kind of professional services to do that? Gaurav Rewari: Just upfront for that period of three to five weeks. After that, the customer generally becomes self-sufficient unless there are some new modules that they want to start. Sramana Mitra: Each deal is what? Several million dollars? Gaurav
Sramana Mitra: How did you find these angels? What was the logic of these angels being in this company? Praful Saklani: Among the people that we brought on as early angels, one was the former CEO of SAP America. He’s actually listed on our website as an advisor. He was involved from a very early stage in
Sramana Mitra: Besides fun.com, have you done anything else in the last 18 months that is worth discussing? Tom Fallenstein: We spend most of our time and money on our internal culture and infrastructure. We put in a million dollar automation system to help put out 35,000 orders in a single day. That’s where a
Sramana Mitra: IT service desk, from a software point of view, it’s ServiceNow. Now you’re talking about agents. Isn’t that being done by these BPO service providers? Gaurav Rewari: That’s a very good question. It’s still being put into ServiceNow. The need for analytics, I would argue, is even greater when you have outsourced part
Sramana Mitra: What are the significant developments in 2008 and 2009? How is the company growing now? Praful Saklani: This is where it gets interesting and fun. 2008 was a phenomenal year for us. We started to see traction with the use cases around understanding the risk inherent in your relationships and how you comply