Sramana: What came next? Chris Gladwin: I started Cleversafe in 2004. Sramana: What was the core idea driving Cleversafe? Chris Gladwin: There were two aspects. First and foremost was the market. At that time, it appeared that the demand for data storage was going to grow rapidly and that has indeed been the case. It
Sramana Mitra: I’d like to double-click down on some of these use cases and examples. Why don’t we pick three or four different scenarios, which are really interesting ways in which your customers and users are using the products. Katya Andresen: I’ll give you a couple of relevant examples. We have a product coming out
Sramana: What did you do after Lockheed? Chris Gladwin: Lockheed was a very good experience because I got to learn what it meant to be a customer of technology products, particularly an enterprise customer. I essentially spent my time evaluating products. Eventually, I felt that I wanted to start building the technology instead of evaluating
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. It almost always is the case that Edtech companies don’t have solid monetization models. Cricket media is experimenting with models that are worth understanding. This interview also further elaborates on the issues raised in one of my articles, Are We In A Golden Age of Edtech?
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. There aren’t many sub $100 million technology companies that can boast of a strong patent portfolio. Cleversafe is that rare exception, and hence, a tremendously valuable company with robust revenue growth in a $20 billion market. Sramana: Chris, let’s start with your background. Where are you
Sramana: How have you structured your technology to support these various use cases? Krishna Kumar: Our app building platform lets you build apps quickly for these various conditions. We use an agent-based model. That is a cool way of predicting human response conditions. We are mimicking the human intelligence response to different conditions and using
Sramana: So your ultimate strategy is to go to market through third party consultants? Krishna Kumar: We want to empower consulting companies to run with projects based in our technology. They are not going to buy into our strategy if two things don’t happen. First, we need to have similar customers in the market that
Sramana Mitra: What is your perspective on this theme that often gets discussed that there’s a bias against women in Silicon Valley. Do you buy it? Ilana Stern: It’s a hard question to answer. I think I’ve been really fortunate in fund raising, team building, and getting support from my environment. I don’t feel disadvantaged.