Patrick Sullivan: It turns out our billing system was turned off. We couldn’t have figured that out because it was so complex at that time. It was one of those things where it was just an eye-opener. You were working on so many different projects at the same time that you always have to fundamentally
Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking now? Patrick Sullivan: That was between 2009 and 2011. Around 2012, we had our first real working platform. We open sourced it. The reason for open sourcing it is, we thought, “If we try to push this out to the world, let’s give this out for free. If
Patrick Sullivan: We started going to a bunch of conferences and then we started explaining our vision on platforms. People started to listen. The next thing we know we started getting calls from people around the world. The problem was it was really hard to determine people who had money and interested versus people who
Sramana Mitra: What else have you done that is an interesting strategic move, whether it’s accelerators or inflection points in your business? Patrick Quinlan: You always learn from your failures more than your successes. The beginning of 2013 was really solid. We were able to raise capital from Sapphire. We had a go-to market plan.
Patrick Sullivan: I worked in sales at Xerox. They have a world-class sales program. At the end of the day, I learned a ton about the business side. You get quite an education on how companies are built. You work with so many companies that you start to see how companies operate. I did that
Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2012? Patrick Quinlan: Going all the way back to Delta and to Rivet, there was this trend of finding something that existed. It didn’t need momentum. We were very good at extending at. We wanted to find a company where there’s no majority shareholder, but had a huge addressable market.
Here’s yet another great case study of a successful bootstrapping whereby the entrepreneurs developed a solid product business eventually. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Patrick Sullivan: I was born in California. I eventually
Sramana Mitra: You also need the direct to get the reference customers before you can get the channel to accept to sell you. Patrick Quinlan: I don’t agree with that one. None of the customers were turning on. The customers were paying us. This was late 2009. Nobody had to file till 2010. What I