Sramana Mitra: How did you go about doing that? Is this your own factory or a third-party that you built a relationship with? That is the cornerstone piece of the delivery part of this business, right? Kyle Vucko: There’re so many other pieces that go into delivering. Sramana Mitra: Acquisition and all that is regular
Sramana Mitra: What percentage of the revenue would you say is BPO services? Atul Jain: We are mostly a software company. When you say professional services, do you mean to say installation and implementation kind of stuff? Sramana Mitra: No, anything that is custom where you’re not selling software. Atul Jain: We don’t do any
Sramana Mitra: You’re offering a content management platform that you offer as a SaaS product to these retailers? David Karandish: Exactly. And in that content management platform, we have a couple of different options. We can provide the content from the Answers.com community. Or we can help partner for the content with top brands. So
Sramana Mitra: What did that allow you to accomplish next? Kyle Vucko: That allowed us to hire a couple of people to really figure out some of the paid acquisition side and continue to refine our processes and scale. Sramana Mitra: Paid advertising kind of stuff?
Sramana Mitra: What happens next? Atul Jain: Since then, we have become a global company. Today, we are about 1,300 employees and doing about $175 million in revenue. We are global with 50% of our revenue coming from outside of North America. Sramana Mitra: Your target customer base is still telecom?
Sramana Mitra: In the timeframe that you’re describing, there was activity in the competitive landscape. Of course Quora, with a huge amount of funding, came into the picture and has since become a very large site. How do you view Quora vis-à-vis Answers.com? David Karandish: First of all, we like to see investment into the
Kyle Vucko: A smaller handful of my mentors got very engaged with the business planning process, providing feedback every few weeks. After being unsuccessful in getting the money in the business plan competitions, I went back and told one of them that we want to raise money and take this to the next level. He agreed immediately and offered some terms. I
Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking about? Atul Jain: We did our first acquisition in 2006 when we were around $20 million. Over time, we have done five acquisitions and this year, our revenue is going to be about $180 million. Sramana Mitra: So in 2006, you bring in another $5 million of revenue