Towards Paperless Contracts: EchoSign CEO Jason Lemkin (Part 1)

Jason Lemkin is CEO and co-founder of EchoSign, an electronic signature automation service. He was previously an entrepreneur-in-residence at Storm Ventures and co-founder of NanoGram Devices, Prior to his work in technology he was a corporate counsel at Venture Law Group. He earned a BA from Harvard and a JD from Berkeley. You can find his

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PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis (Part 7)

SM: In 2006 you decided to take VC money. Why then? VS: Our business got pretty big, relatively speaking. I am not an insider in that area, but we started getting calls from tier 1 VCs. I was never interested in just doing the rounds, but I figured if folks like that wanted to court

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PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis (Part 6)

SM: How did you manage to leave the OEM model as your go-to-market strategy? VS: The idea was to go straight to the customer. If you have hundreds of thousands of small customers paying you a small amount a month, it is better than one customer paying a lot at one time.

PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis (Part 5)

SM: What year did you finally become profitable after you made the transition from consulting to applications? VS: I believe it was 1997. We had the answering machine and fax. That was the core business in 1997. We were shipping worldwide and we had a good reputation.

PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis (Part 4)

SM: What was the application that you were developing at the time? VS: It was an answering machine on the PC. We developed the application, and it would not work. We had a meeting with HP up in Boston, and we were getting worried. My chief engineer and I had a sleepless night and found

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PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis (Part 3)

SM: Did you build your business yourself, or did you take outside funding? VS: We were not funded. We were always self-sustained. Eventually we figured out that we could reuse code we had, which let us focus on specific types of projects.

PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis (Part 2)

SM: Tell me about your first job at Corporate Data Science. VS: It was in the very early days before Windows and before DOS, back in 1981. I was a Unix systems engineer. They were trying to come up with an Operating System.

PBX as SaaS: RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis (Part 1)

Vlad is the CEO and founder of RingCentral, which provides VoIP, hosted PBX, voicemail, fax and Internet call waiting services through platforms such as RingCentral.com, Pagoo.com and Buzme.com. Prior to RingCentral he was the founder and CEO of Ring Zero, a provider of desktop voice and fax communication software for the OEM market. He graduated

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