Connecting The Censored Internet: AnchorFree CEO David Gorodyansky, Mountain View, CA (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How has your user growth been affected by the Middle East protests? David Gorodyansky: In Egypt we had about 100,000 users before the uprisings. When they blocked Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the sites, our usage jumped to 1 million users in a single day. We did not market or advertise; that

Read Full Article »

Connecting The Censored Internet: AnchorFree CEO David Gorodyansky, Mountain View, CA (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is the ad server infrastructure that supports 2 billion page view a month? David Gorodyansky: It is our own infrastructure. We work with a lot of partners to sell the ads. We have hired a lot of engineers but not a lot of ad sales people. We partner with companies like Yahoo!

Read Full Article »

Connecting The Censored Internet: AnchorFree CEO David Gorodyansky, Mountain View, CA (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was your motivation for raising a second round of funding? Was it related to the censorship market? David Gorodyansky: In 2008 when we had our second round of money, we did it exactly for that reason. We were already well funded to address the Western market, but we wanted to cater to

Read Full Article »

Connecting The Censored Internet: AnchorFree CEO David Gorodyansky, Mountain View, CA (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: All word-of-mouth advertising is seeded somewhere. How did you seed your word-of-mouth campaign? David Gorodyansky: I think it just kind of took off. I would love to identify a specific news article or event that made it happen, but I am not sure what that is. I know that it started taking off

Read Full Article »

Connecting The Censored Internet: AnchorFree CEO David Gorodyansky, Mountain View, CA (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In 2005, did you plan to do what your business is doing today? David Gorodyansky: This is what we planned to do, but it has evolved a bit. There is another very major functionality of the product that we did not even realized when we launched. We filed a bunch of patents after

Read Full Article »

Connecting The Censored Internet: AnchorFree CEO David Gorodyansky, Mountain View, CA (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  David Gorodyansky is the CEO and co-founder of AnchorFree. Previously, David founded Intelligent Buying Inc., a profitable asset management company and reseller of IT enterprise networking equipment. Prior to that, David launched a B2B Web service in the field of competitive intelligence, which in turn, gave

Read Full Article »

Growing A SaaS Startup With Velocity: Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez (Part 7)

Sramana: What is your forecast for this year? Phil Fernandez: We will do in the up $30 million of annual recurring revenue. We will achieve the same fourth-year revenue that Salesforce.com achieved in their fourth year. The difference is that they spent $250 million to build that market, and I have spent $17 million. It

Read Full Article »

Growing A SaaS Startup With Velocity: Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez (Part 6)

Sramana: How much revenue did you generate in 2008? Phil Fernandez: We did $400,000 of subscription revenue. Sramana: How many customers did you have? Phil Fernandez: We had acquired 70 customers by the end of that year.