Sramana: Where you trying to develop another company after you returned to India or did you decide to go back into services work? Manish Sharma: I continued forward with my goal of establishing a product company. I finally came up with a product idea in the AI space which had been a passion of mine
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. This is an interesting story of how an open source software company built around Cassandra was incubated by RackSpace and has grown to $5 million in revenue. Founded by engineers Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, the interview traces not only the successes of their journey but
Sramana: So you partnered with Informix? Manish Sharma: Yes, we partnered with Informix. They could not meet the deal requirements without us because they were a product provider, not a systems integrator. The database was a small part of the overall project. We had to submit our own credentials to win the bid. We worked
Sramana: Can you talk, Christophe, about what has been your strategy in terms of building the team? You started with four co-founders and sounds like Julien came on board about a year later. Who else is on the team now, how big is the team and what has been your philosophy in building the team
Sramana: Why would the National Stock Exchange commission ask you to build a mission critical transaction system? Did you have credentials to gain their confidence? Manish Sharma: They were not our first customer. We were able to build a good portfolio before we started working on those high profile projects. Our first customer was Indian
Sramana: Talk about the execution side. You mentioned that the ad networks were not really setup to work with a telecom company in this mode. So which ad network were you able to work with to get this model going? Julien: Christophe, you want to take that one? Christophe: Yeah. I would not say that
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Manish Sharma is the co-founder and CEO of Printo, a Bangalore, India-based company specializing in high quality printing. Manish is a serial entrepreneur who began his career in 1995 as an early member of the startup team at Rediff.com. He went on to be the co-founder of DBS Internet
Sramana: Can you give me some idea about how the company ramped in terms of users beyond May 2012 when you brought to market the product with the more advanced functionality. Christophe: We had 9 million downloads at the end of 2012. Today we have 20 million. Sramana: That’s pretty fast. May 2012 to December