From Free To Premium With Ease: YouSendIt Cofounder Ranjith Kumaran (Part 3)

SM: I understand there were three cofounders. Did any of you take a salary role in the beginning of the company? RK: The other guys were still consulting at their previous jobs. I was out raising seed capital to keep the company going because my former company had just been purchased. I was able to

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From Free To Premium With Ease: YouSendIt Cofounder Ranjith Kumaran (Part 2)

SM: What was the competitive landscape like at that point? RK: Right around the time we launched another small company out of Los Angeles called Dropload. It did not take off as quickly as hoped.

From Free To Premium With Ease: YouSendIt Cofounder Ranjith Kumaran (Part 1)

Ranjith Kumaran is the founder and chief technology officer for YouSendIt. Prior to YouSendIt, Kumaran held marketing positions at Verisity Design, and he was the director of sales engineering at Celoxica. He has also worked as a software systems engineer at Red Hat. Kumaran received a bachelor of engineering degree in computer engineering from McGill

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Rolling Up E-mail Security SaaS: Gary Steele, CEO Of Proofpoint (Part 7)

SM: Your Series A investors are reaching the seven-year point and are probably looking for an exit. GS: They are long-term, patient investors. They are not looking for a short-term returns in order to raise their next fund. We are in a very different spot from what other folks could be.

Rolling Up E-mail Security SaaS: Gary Steele, CEO Of Proofpoint (Part 6)

SM: I have known other companies that have acquired venture-owned companies, and they did it via an all-cash transaction. The CEO worked out a valuation with the acquisition company, then went back to his investors and presented the deal and raised the cash to make the acquisition happen. GS: Cash is easier, but those deals

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Rolling Up E-mail Security SaaS: Gary Steele, CEO Of Proofpoint (Part 5)

SM: How did you accomplish the financial engineering of the company ramp and product development? GS: Series A was $8 million, which the company had in place before I arrived. That was enough to build the security product.

Rolling Up E-mail Security SaaS: Gary Steele, CEO Of Proofpoint (Part 4)

SM: When you were flying out to your 25 potential customers and converting three of them into very large customers, what was the competitive landscape? GS: There were a lot of existing vendors. CipherTrust was a player; it turned into Secure Computing and was then bought by McAfee.

Rolling Up E-mail Security SaaS: Gary Steele, CEO Of Proofpoint (Part 3)

SM: Once you had a large enterprise willing to test the product for the first time, how did you handle the test? GS: I put our engineering team on-site because I knew that they would find bugs. You can’t deploy new technology and not find bugs.