Sramana: How did you go about building your team in Croatia? Alex Fuller: We flew out there and did some relatively simple job advertising. We set up an assessment center where we invited people to come and spend a couple of days with us. We put them through a training course because the Force.com platform
Sramana: If you were to position this in the context of 2009, when you founded the company, what would the competitive landscape look like? Who was your closest competitor? Alex Fuller: That’s a good question. We were offering this system to a number of companies but the telecom sector was a key focus for us
Sramana Mitra: Who was your co-founder? How did you know him? Why him? David Barrett: His name is Witold Stankiewicz. He was my first hire at Red Swoosh. After I got fired, within a couple of weeks, everyone else quit. I was what was really holding that team at Akamai. They brought in some other
The Force.com platform has been a great bootstrapping device for entrepreneurs. Read how Alex and Richard Britton bootstrapped CloudSense to a sizable product company on the platform. Sramana: Alex, let’s start with your personal journey. Where were you born and raised? What are the roots of your entrepreneurial story? Alex Fuller: I was born in
Sramana: You have a unique situation in a founder-financed company. Where do you see things going in the future? Are you going to take a traditional route and look for an exit? Ratmir Timashev: Our current vision is to continue growing as a private company. We don’t need venture capital funds to keep growing. We
Sramana Mitra: You joined that company in what capacity? David Barrett: Titles in startups are pretty meaningless, but I was the technology guy. I guess you could call me Head of Engineering or CTO. Travis wasn’t the programmer. I started off doing everything, and then I hired a team under me to help me out. Sramana
Sramana: When you founded Veeam and entered this market, there were all sorts of different players in different segments of the market. You were able to create a differentiated position for Veeam. What was the process of understanding and analyzing the market that allowed you to create your positioning? Ratmir Timashev: Part of that insight
VCs in Silicon Valley want financial levers that allow you to grow with a hockey-stick curve. Expensify doesn’t have that. In my opinion, however, they have built an excellent, profitable, steady growth subscription business that has an attractive viral characteristic. The business, at some point, may accelerate naturally, but as David notes, the levers are