Sramana Mitra: For the Series A investors, what did you tell them you were going to do? What problem were you going to solve? J. Paul Haynes: I described to them the problem of solving cyber security in the mid-market. Everybody in the industry at that time appeared to be focused on the enterprise. We
Sramana Mitra: What did you do and what model were you trying to reach? Carl Ryden: There were a couple things that changed during that time. One is, the transactional sales people that we hired were not a good fit for our culture and how we operated. When we made changes, we wrote down our values.
Sramana Mitra: Before all this, it sounds like you started doing companies in ’76. I don’t think we have enough time to cover that long a story. It sounds like you have a background in enterprise security software. Could you give us a little bit of an idea about what you did before? J. Paul
Sramana Mitra: You must have had a lot of relationships in that business since you were coming into this business trying to do something better than what you’ve done before. Did many of those relationships convert into paying customers? Carl Ryden: Yes. We call them switchers. We get someone to switch from something they had
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. There are opportunities of building cloud businesses focused on mid-market customers, and many entrepreneurs are leveraging those to build compelling businesses. eSentire’s strategy is one worth looking at closely. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were
Sramana Mitra: I need you to step through the process of building this company. Let’s start by zeroing in on the concept that you and Ken agreed on, and how you came up with that concept. Carl Ryden: We started with a general framework of building a business where it has primary value through its
Sramana Mitra: How does the professional services group work? Do you have your own in-house voice people, or once you get the project, you figure it out and use the platform to recruit them? David Ciccarelli: The latter. It’s the same platform and the same talent. The clients either don’t have the time or it’s the
Sramana Mitra: What were you trying to build? Carl Ryden: I wanted to build software that helped manage configurations of home electronics. You can drag them on and it would tell you the best way to hook up your home stereo. It was called hookitupright.com. I built the application and put a lot of time