How To Defend Your Dream Against All Odds: Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks (Part 4)

Sramana: Where did you and your investors agendas diverge? Alex Bouzari: The investors wanted us to go into the broad market with that technology while we kept telling them that it was not technology that applied to the broad market. It was high-performance, high-capacity storage for unstructured data. We had put in three years of

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How To Defend Your Dream Against All Odds: Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks (Part 3)

Sramana: How did you fund Mega Drive Systems? Alex Bouzari: With the few dollars that we received from licensing our previous companies technology, as well as some of our credit cards. We worked 16-hour days. We designed the product, wrote the data sheets, and sold them to customers ourselves. In 1988 we managed to generate

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How to Avoid a “No” from a Venture Capitalist

By guest author Gerry Langeler from his e-book  “Take the Money and Run! An Insider’s Guide to Venture Capital” The old saying in the VC business is investors invest in three things: people, people and people. There’s more than a little truth to that. We’ve seen great teams dig themselves out of some deep holes, and weak

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How To Defend Your Dream Against All Odds: Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks (Part 2)

Sramana: What did you do after you completed your master’s studies? Alex Bouzari: After a year there I was starting to explore my PhD, and at the same time I really wanted to get a company going. A friend from Caltech was involved in helping some technology companies get established in the U.S. and introduced

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How To Defend Your Dream Against All Odds: Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks (Part 1)

Alex Bouzari is the co-founder and CEO of DataDirect Networks. Prior to co-founding DataDirect Networks, he served as CEO of Personal Writer, Inc., and co-founder of MegaDrive Systems, Inc. Bouzari has bachelor of science degrees in engineering and economics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and has done graduate work in engineering at the

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Letting Customers Design The Product: Cornerstone OnDemand CEO Adam Miller (Part 7)

Sramana: The talent management space today is much more mature than it was in 2001. SuccessFactors and Taleo have both had very successful IPOs. Would you talk some about the evolution of the industry and how you evolved with the industry? Adam Miller: When we started, we were the small fish in a big pond.

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Letting Customers Design The Product: Cornerstone OnDemand CEO Adam Miller (Part 5)

Sramana: Essentially, your angel financing allowed you to build your product and develop your pipeline? Adam Miller: Exactly. We were also raising incremental money throughout in very small chunks. I was perpetually raising money. I was doing that in parallel with everything else for years.

Letting Customers Design The Product: Cornerstone OnDemand CEO Adam Miller (Part 4)

Sramana: When you decided you were going to sell to large enterprises and you were going to aggregate the online training providers, what did you learn in terms of demand? What were enterprises looking for? Adam Miller: Back then, there were already competitors in the space. We assumed that as a startup we would have

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