Sramana Mitra: How did your VCs react on the topic of a virtual company? Fred Plais: This divides people a lot. The world is changing. People are starting to buy the story more and more. We need the same engineers at Google today. We’re doing some complex things on cloud. It requires some extremely experienced
Sramana Mitra: Your first financing was US financing? Fred Plais: It was financed by French and Finnish VCs. It’s difficult when you’re pivoting. You get a business that’s not going that fast anymore and you get another one which is picking up. You need to reinvent everything. Financial investors have a timeline. They’ve been supportive.
Sramana Mitra: What was the pricing model for this product? Fred Plais: It’s a yearly subscription which includes the old product. You’re getting your hosting part of the subscription but you also get all the DevOps workflow that comes with this. For a price starting at $15,000 per year, you get hosting capabilities, 24/7 support,
Sramana Mitra: In 2015, you decided to create this cloud stack. Then you started getting traction with other customers like Magento. How did you get to that? What gave you the idea of building that stack? Fred Plais: We were involved in several e-commerce projects where things were failing because of DevOps. It was always
Sramana Mitra: We’re going to need to double-click on that. What do you actually provide? My understanding is that Magento is a hosted e-commerce platform. Fred Plais: Exactly. When you take a look at what a development team on the web is, you’re going to have 3 to 4 people that are managing the servers.
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Fred has built a wonderful company with a virtual architecture. Read on to see how. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Fred Plais: I was