Do It For Me Analytics: Anil Kaul, CEO of Absolutdata (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Give me some examples of a typical client situation. Anil Kaul: For example, our client wanted to optimize their advertising spend. This was a company here in the Bay Area. It’s an online company and they had been doing a lot of spending. At some point in time, they decided to run a

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Building a Technology Product Company From India: Varun Singh, Founder and CTO of ScaleArc (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This was what year? Varun Singh: This was 2009. Sramana Mitra: What is ScaleArc? Varun Singh: ScaleArc is a database traffic management company. We provide a software that runs on top of MySQL and provide users the ability to run on a distributed data source without having to understand the application. Sramana Mitra:

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Building a Technology Product Company From India: Varun Singh, Founder and CTO of ScaleArc (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I didn’t find studying engineering boring at all. Varun Singh: The guys at PC Quest were so exciting. It probably wasn’t boring, but I started working with people who were a little too exciting at that point in time. Sramana Mitra: At 18, you were in Mumbai working for Chip Magazine. How long did that

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Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 1)

The InfoUSA founders sold their information service business and reconvened to build InfoFree, a next generation Data-as-a-Service business. The company is funded with $15 million of funding from the co-founders, especially Vin Gupta, founder of InfoUSA, and is in the $5M+ revenue range and is now looking to scale to the next level. Sramana Mitra:

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Scaling a Cloud Telephony Company in India: Knowlarity CEO Ambarish Gupta (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Given that it is such a high-touch customer service model, the question that I’m trying to ask you is. Right now you’re heavily venture-funded and you can finance your cost. At scale, does this company have the unit economics to become profitable? Ambarish Gupta: Well, that’s true. The unit economics of this product is

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Scaling a Cloud Telephony Company in India: Knowlarity CEO Ambarish Gupta (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of companies do you recruit as channel partners? Ambarish Gupta: These are like a tiny version of SIs in India. SMBs in India for their technical support requirements depend on large local companies who for example distribute laptops, computers, and computer accessories. Sramana Mitra: How do you find them?

Scaling a Cloud Telephony Company in India: Knowlarity CEO Ambarish Gupta (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Was the product you developed acceptable within the Indian regulatory system? Ambarish Gupta: Yes. We solved the problem for India. Most of the emerging markets have the same regulations, which is VoIP is not allowed. We spent our first year developing the first PSTN cloud telephony platform in the world. That was a big breakthrough

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Scaling a Cloud Telephony Company in India: Knowlarity CEO Ambarish Gupta (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Whom did you raise money from and what was the process of raising money? Ambarish Gupta: Initially, I and my co-founder just put in 1-1.5 million rupees (~$20,000 -$30,000) to build the infrastructure. We had built up a small platform and were struggling to find some takers. We didn’t really want to raise money immediately.

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