Mary and her husband, Eric, have been scrappy bootstrappers through a decade-long journey building Boom Cards. Awesome story! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
Sramana Mitra: In this 2017 relationship with Nutanix that you started, how far did you go with Nutanix customers before you went into the next partnership? Simon Taylor: We didn’t look at it like that. We looked at this as a multi-cloud Backup-as-a-Service platform. When you’re building with a strategic technology partner, you need to
Sramana Mitra: The business partner who has all these outsourcing companies, is he Slovenian? Simon Taylor: Serbian actually. He still runs a large outsourcing company. We spun out from them. We started moving very quickly. We added our first 500 customers in our first year. We added a thousand in the second. Sramana Mitra: This
Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the sales side. How did you leverage the Citrix channel to reach the customer base? Simon Taylor: I was in my late 20s. I flew to Fort Lauderdale where the Citrix headquarters was. I walked in and just said I wanted to talk to the Alliances team. I was introduced
Sramana Mitra: There is a lot of IP that didn’t quite get anywhere. SuccessFactors is a company that was built exactly how you did it. Lars Daalgard bought the IP at a Redwood City auction and repurposed it. This is a way of building companies if you can locate IP that has value. Simon Taylor:
Sramana Mitra: You identified some Citrix monitoring IP. Where was this IP located? Simon Taylor: It was in Slovenia. It became the technology capital of central Europe at that time. They have become incredibly adept at artificial intelligence. With what we’re seeing in Ukraine today and the attacks by Russia, it’s extremely concerning what’s going
Simon offers excellent insights into creating an unfair advantage with unique engineering team leverage in off-center locations. He also discusses creative channel strategy techniques. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
Sramana Mitra: The whole industry has become really good at deal-making by just using Zoom. This is very much in favor of international entrepreneurs. You can now do deals globally just by using online tools. Abinash Saikia: We thought that we would probably need to meet at some point. We were able to build good