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

Read Full Article »

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

Read Full Article »

Transforming Healthcare: Epocrates CEO Kirk Loevner (Part 7)

SM: Candidly, are there other companies who are executing as well with a strong adoption curve? KL: WebMD has done very well. A big part of their business is consumer, and their growth rate has slowed dramatically.

Transforming Healthcare: Epocrates CEO Kirk Loevner (Part 6)

SM: Let’s talk about TAM. You looked at $400 million TAM on the physician side and $14 billion TAM on the pharma advertising side. Now we are looking at $250 billion TAM on the health care administration side. Those are serious orders of magnitude. KL: I think right now we are taking smaller steps. The

Read Full Article »