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- The Startup Velocity Question
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Launching and Scaling a Security Startup During an Out-of-Favor Time: HyTrust President Eric Chiu (Part 7)
Sramana: What about your company team? When you started you where you the CEO? Eric Chiu: When we started out I was CEO and Renata was VP of Product Management. We hired on a CTO soon after who I consider a quasi founder. We then hired a Sales VP from VMWare. Jim Gannon is still
Launching and Scaling a Security Startup During an Out-of-Favor Time: HyTrust President Eric Chiu (Part 6)
Sramana: How much money did you raise from VCs? Eric Chiu: We raised 5.4 million dollars in Series A. In the end we also converted our 200,000 dollars into that Series A. That allowed us to start paying ourselves again. I think you have to have that period where you are not making any money.
Launching and Scaling a Security Startup During an Out-of-Favor Time: HyTrust President Eric Chiu (Part 5)
Sramana: Raising money like that is very difficult these days. You were able to get VCs to invest in a concept and that is not common. What was it about your situation that enabled you to clinch the opportunity? Eric Chiu: First, I think we went to the right firms. Trident committed to the term
Launching and Scaling a Security Startup During an Out-of-Favor Time: HyTrust President Eric Chiu (Part 4)
Sramana: Let me probe a bit on that because you bring up an important point. Can you use your own value proposition and investment thesis for the Series A? What was your investment thesis, and why were VCs telling you no? In my experience of fundraising, VCs typically give you good feedback, and if you
Launching and Scaling a Security Startup During an Out-of-Favor Time: HyTrust President Eric Chiu (Part 3)
Sramana: During that 10-month time between starting HyTrust and getting funded, you still had living expenses. Did you guys have any financing? How did you live? What did you accomplish with that $200,000? Eric Chiu: We did our own seed financing and followed the classic bootstrapped model. We spent only about half of the money
Launching and Scaling a Security Startup During an Out-of-Favor Time: HyTrust President Eric Chiu (Part 2)
Sramana: What led you to Hytrust? Eric Chiu: I was running sales and business development for Cemaphore. I was in the process of evaluating some other job offers and different startups and I had the board members from those companies calling me to figure out what decision I had made. During that period one of
Launching and Scaling a Security Startup During an Out-of-Favor Time: HyTrust President Eric Chiu (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Eric Chiu is the co-founder and president of HyTrust, a virtualization security company. He has more than 13 years of experience in high-tech management and finance. Most recently he was the VP of sales and business development for Cemaphore Systems. Prior to Cemaphore, he led business
CEO Transition, Founder Liquidity, and More: Bill Daniel, CEO AllWebLeads (Part 7)
Sramana: A private liquidity exit can be bad if the founder is crucial to the success of the business. I saw a similar situation where the founder did not allow a team to get built around him. I am surprised the investors allowed him to have that liquidity event. They needed to raise money, and