Sramana: How far did you take the e-commerce business? Ratmir Timashev: The good thing is that we decided to build our online store on the Microsoft Windows NT platform, which was a business operating system and the first stable server. It became Windows 2000 and is now known as Windows Server 2012. My partner became a top expert on Windows NT
Sramana: What year did you leave school to start your first business? Ratmir Timashev: I left in 1995. Sramana: In 1995 the Internet was starting to take off. What kind of business did you start? Ratmir Timashev: It was the early days of the Internet. I started that business with Andrei Baronov who has been
You have read some of the Unicorn Series pieces already: Tableau, FireEye, RightNow, Palo Alto Networks and several others. Here’s a company that gets little coverage but is performing at Unicorn levels. Sramana: Ratmir, let’s start our discussion by reviewing your background. Where are you from? What are the roots of your entrepreneurial journey? Ratmir
Sramana: So one of the key value points is that you can provide a platform solution as opposed to various point solutions. Do you offer incremental access to the platform? Ricardo Villadiego: Clients can start with one product and have the aspiration to implement the whole platform. The company was built around the crossover concept. We
Sramana: What did you do after you raised the $11 million round of funding? Ricardo Villadiego: We literally took the company global. We added a lot of resources in the US to cover it coast to coast. We added sales offices all over the country as well as an innovation center in Atlanta where we
Sramana: What did you do with the money that you raised in your initial round? Ricardo Villadiego: After I closed our first round in April 2010 with Progressive Capital based in Medellin, Columbia, we focused on growth in Latin America. By the end of 2010, Gartner approached us because we had picked up so many
Sramana: How many customers were involved in the early R&D and validation stage? Ricardo Villadiego: I could count the number of people on one hand. There were a maximum of 5. Sramana: That is fantastic. For an entrepreneur to get 3 to 5 solid enterprise customers for a complex system like this early on is
Sramana: You said that you launched the company in 2006 but you had to stay with IBM for a while, so you were not able to work on the company full-time until 2009. What happened between 2006 and 2009? Ricardo Villadiego: We were searching through different technical approaches to tackle the problem. Sramana: So you