Ryan has bootstrapped a FinTech small business lending business from Michigan, raised Private Equity funding to scale, and then bought the PE stake back through a Management Buy-out. Excellent case study! Sramana Mitra: All right, Ryan, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of
Sramana Mitra: Okay. So based on this, in terms of prioritization, are you going more after the enterprise accounts, the very large deals like the Infosys, TCS, and IBM global services, or are you going after the mid-market? Where are you finding traction?
Sramana Mitra: So coming back to what you just said on the how, let’s double click down one more level. Take me through examples of how you use generative AI to stitch together these disparate systems in the software development process.
Sramana Mitra: Great. Let’s kind of role play through this and tell what you pitch to your VCs from a TAM point of view. What is the positioning? What segment are you going after? What use cases are you going after? What is the pricing model? What is the business model or the pricing model?
Sramana Mitra: So, for six-seven years, you stayed in the same company, is that right? Erik Severinghaus: No, I was at SpringCM. We built that. We got it growing again. We ended up selling that to DocuSign right before the pandemic.
Sramana Mitra: It’s much more than that. We come up with this issue all the time. I recently published a series called The Startup Velocity Question, and the thesis of it is, ‘why do venture funded startups not achieve velocity?’, which equates to failure basically, because we see that trying to go from zero to
Sramana Mitra: How did you get that off the ground? Erik Severinghaus: It began with me just investing my own personal money – the money I made at IBM and some of the money that I made at iContact. After maybe a year or so of running it, I started to look for outside capital and
Erik discusses his journey as a serial entrepreneur and we deep dive into the Positioning of Bloomfilter. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and what kind of background?