categories
HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
interview
Cracking the Very Small Business Market: PayCycle CEO Jim Heeger (Part 10)
SM: That is good insight to carry to the audience in this particular type of business. I have heard that about the GoToMeeting product as well, that they have no vertical bias at all. They are trying to focus on very small businesses as well, and are finding no vertical alignment whatsoever. Switching topics, you
Speeding Up the Internet: Algorithms Guru and Akamai Founder Tom Leighton (Part 7)
SM: This is a really big problem. How close to the last mile can you get? You are going to need millions of servers to cover the world. TL: I don’t think so. The way we think, a server can serve a gigabit a second. It is pretty economical. If you look at TV quality,
Cracking the Very Small Business Market: PayCycle CEO Jim Heeger (Part 9)
SM: Out of 5.2M small businesses, only 800,000 are using a software service for payroll? JH: It is under 16%, and that is why this is an attractive space because it is un-penetrated. All 5.2M of those people have some solution, but our belief is that a lot of them are doing it manually and
Speeding Up the Internet: Algorithms Guru and Akamai Founder Tom Leighton (Part 6)
SM: So, you are saying that centralized data centers have higher latency, and thus lower throughput, and that prevents TV quality video or higher, making the video-on-demand experience unsatisfactory. Is there an example of this you could give? I think it would be helpful to illustrate the point. TL: We have a great case study
Cracking the Very Small Business Market: PayCycle CEO Jim Heeger (Part 8)
SM: Financial institutions seem like a great distribution channel for small business payroll. JH: I think the distribution strategy is to be where people are likely to buy payroll. Be on the web, be at retail, be at the accountant, and be at the banks. SM: You do the tax portion as well. How about
Speeding Up the Internet: Algorithms Guru and Akamai Founder Tom Leighton (Part 5)
SM: Let’s take that question and apply it to all these recent media reactions you are getting about Level 3’s announcement that CDN is going to be a commodity and all these telcos are going to provide CDNs. [My previous coverage here.] TL: I think the Telcos have always provided CDN. There has been no
Cracking the Very Small Business Market: PayCycle CEO Jim Heeger (Part 7)
SM: Okay, so August Capital funded Series B and you came in after Series C? JH: No, actually I came in 2005, after Doll Capital had done a series D, and put in another $9M. SM: How far along was the company when you arrived? JH: We had 60-70 people, and about 13,000 customers. SM:
Speeding Up the Internet: Algorithms Guru and Akamai Founder Tom Leighton (Part 4)
SM: You are saying that the middle does not have a business model supporting it. The first mile and last mile have business models, but the middle does not. TL: Right. The middle mile is where you get into a lot of problems with the Internet. It is because there is no money flowing in
