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- The Startup Velocity Question
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Building an App Platform Company from the Netherlands: Mendix CEO Derek Roos (Part 4)
Sramana: How many VC funds were operating in Amsterdam? Did you know them well? Derek Roos: There are very little options in the Netherlands. There are a lot of angel investors but we were looking for an institutional investor and there are a handful of institutional investors there. There are maybe 10 at most. It
Building an App Platform Company from the Netherlands: Mendix CEO Derek Roos (Part 3)
Sramana: Let’s talk about the rest of your team. You were in business school, but you had technical co-founders. How did this team come together? Derek Roos: At the company that I was working for while I was going to business school, there was another individual there who became my co-founder. He had a technical
Building an App Platform Company from the Netherlands: Mendix CEO Derek Roos (Part 2)
Sramana: What specifically do you mean when you say application development? Are you talking about web applications or mobile applications? Derek Roos: Both, actually. When we say applications, we are talking about business applications. The Mendix app platform means web and mobile at the same time. Our vision for applications is that it should not
Building an App Platform Company from the Netherlands: Mendix CEO Derek Roos (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Derek Roos is the CEO if Mendix, an enterprise app platform company looking to bridge the gap between business and IT, making business application development dramatically easier, faster and collaborative. Derek earned a master of science degree in business administration from Erasmus University, Rotterdam. He is
A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry (Part 7)
Sramana: What was the premise behind Zscaler? Jay Chaudhry: We wanted to offer web security in the cloud. We also recognized that the world would be increasingly mobile. We also needed to do integration of point products. We did not need one for URL filtering, one for caching, one for antivirus, and one for DLP.
A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry (Part 6)
Sramana: At some point you did sell your first company to Verisign. What came next? Jay Chaudhry: I stayed with Verisign for a while. I left in late 1999 after 18 months, although my obligation was only 12 months. I was ready to do more startups. I was driven by a few things. First, I
A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry (Part 5)
Sramana: Tell us about the first offer to buy your company. How was the proposal made and how did you evaluate it? Jay Chaudhry: The CEO of an existing public company called me up one day out of the blue. He told me he wanted to buy my company, and I told him that I
A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey: Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry (Part 4)
Sramana: After you were unable to get VC funding, how did you finance the company? Jay Chaudhry: My wife and I talked and we decided to put our life savings on the line. We figured that if our business was successful then we would have fulfilled the dream, and if it failed then we could