categories
HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
entrepreneur journeys
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: What is an average deal size from your direct customers? Paresh Patel: It’s very skewed. We have customers whose deal sizes are in the millions. We also have deal sizes that are in the hundreds or thousands. We have customers that have more than a hundred thousand machines with us. Then we have
Building a Mid-Market Cyber Security Company from Utah: Peter Bookman, CEO of Guard Dog (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Not only that, it addresses my next question. The enterprise CISO right now is so overwhelmed. For a startup, to get an audience with an enterprise CISO has become almost impossible. There are the known players, but that’s about it. When it comes to the new players, they have to go through somebody.
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: What happens next? Paresh Patel: We started to prepare the company for scale. We had just received our Series A. We got $12 million in the bank. I first hired a COO and then a CFO. We opened up a new office. We messed up. We hired too fast and too big. Too
Building a Mid-Market Cyber Security Company from Utah: Peter Bookman, CEO of Guard Dog (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Let’s come back to your story. Did Fusion-io go public? Peter Bookman: It did. It was relatively smooth. A year and a half later, I left to start a virtual desktop company. That transacted again to another storage company Sandisk. I love listening to and solving a real problem. Whether we look at
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: The form factor of your product was that you would just clip it on a retail machine? Paresh Patel: The design was remarkably simple. It almost works like a thumb drive. You just take the device and plug it into the machine. In three seconds, it could take that legacy machine and convert
Building a Mid-Market Cyber Security Company from Utah: Peter Bookman, CEO of Guard Dog (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: In your case, the fact that you had a successful exit was helpful. Repeat founders always have an easier time raising money. Peter Bookman: It does not hurt when your story can begin with, “I had a good horse and a good jockey. We won the race.” It does something else. You tend
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: I’ve experienced the use case that you described. The gas station around the corner from me doesn’t have any digital payment option. Paresh Patel: That was the problem. The machine only took cash. Sramana Mitra: Do the gas station people attend these kinds of trade shows?‘
Building a Mid-Market Cyber Security Company from Utah: Peter Bookman, CEO of Guard Dog (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: Did you work for SonicWall? Peter Bookman: I did not. I transitioned out. I’m always excited about the next opportunity. Sramana Mitra: What year was that? Peter Bookman: 2001.
