Accidental Entrepreneur: Cryptography Research President Paul Kocher (Part 2)

SM: What was the business model for your new company? PK: It was clear that the consulting model was good for stability, but I like to shake things up. I started putting all the extra money we could into R&D and patents.

Accidental Entrepreneur: Cryptography Research President Paul Kocher (Part 1)

Paul founded Cryptography Research, where he now serves as president and chief scientist. He has held positions at RSA Security and was a founding member of Valicert, Inc. (Tumbleweed). Among his notable accomplishments are his work on SSL 3.0, the DES Key Search machine, and discovering timing attacks and Differential Power Analysis. He holds a

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From Dyslexia to SugarCRM: John Roberts (Part 7)

SM: On a personal level, how has dyslexia impacted your growth and success? JR: When we got our first patent at Sugar my name was typed wrong. It was Johri. I was a bit upset about that, although they corrected it. Then I thought about it longer. If you look at it, the ri looks

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From Dyslexia to SugarCRM: John Roberts (Part 6)

SM: What else has come out in your genre the last four years? JR: If you look at commercial open source, which is the category we put ourselves into, there are about 20 companies . Zembra had the same model as ours and was founded at the same time. It was sold to Yahoo for

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From Dyslexia to SugarCRM: John Roberts (Part 5)

SM: Can you take us through the process of building your sales team? JR: People started calling from all over the world, so we built four different sales channels: an ecommerce engine, an inside sales team, a channel sales team and enterprise sales team.

From Dyslexia to SugarCRM: John Roberts (Part 4)

SM: Who is your customer base? Do you mainly have small businesses? JR: This is a very interesting area to explore. In open source there is very little control over who your customers are. As a result, we have everything from big banks to the Men’s Warehouse.

From Dyslexia to SugarCRM: John Roberts (Part 3)

SM: The situation you described is not a pretty one. Why did you do it? Did you have any idea how you were going to make money? JR: We just believed. It was pretty early on. We did not know how we would make money. We hoped to be able to create a commercial version,

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From Dyslexia to SugarCRM: John Roberts (Part 2)

SM: During that timeframe, what did you think were the bright flashing lights of OpenSource? JR: It was all about hope and belief. That is why in the fall of 2003 I decided to go for it. I asked my wife for six months to chase this idea.