Best of Bootstrapping: Ownership Matters

For those of you rushing to raise venture capital with a deck of slides or a minimum viable product, let me offer you a challenge: How can you get to a $20 million pre-money valuation in Series A, raise $5 million, and keep control of 80% of the equity? That’s what Christian Chabot, founder of

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Ownership Matters

For those of you rushing to raise venture capital with a deck of slides or a minimum viable product, let me offer you a challenge: How can you get to a $20 million pre-money valuation in Series A, raise $5 million, and keep control of 80% of the equity?

What’s Next For Salesforce.com?

SaaS customer relationship management (CRM) vendors Salesforce.com and RightNow recently reported second quarter results that beat estimates. Salesforce.com has been on an acquisition spree, acquiring eight companies over the year. What will be its next move? Let’s take a closer look.

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Laef Olson, CIO of RightNow (Part 7)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: Let’s talk about moving to Google Apps or Google e-mail at some point. Right now you work on an Exchange platform. You have developed all your applications on top of the Microsoft environment. Now if you move to Google, all of that investment kind of becomes

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Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Laef Olson, CIO of RightNow (Part 6)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: Based on my research, I see a distinct trend [toward] interesting private cloud deployment. LO: Very interesting! What would you say is the driver; I am curious to know. SM: I think it’s cost that is the driver, which is why I was probing that, to

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Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Laef Olson, CIO Of RightNow (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: How do you handle pricing for a situation such as the private cloud deployment for the Department of Defense (DoD)? Your primary product is on a per user per month subscription model, right?

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Laef Olson, CIO of RightNow (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: What is your take on security in the cloud? As part of delivering this enormous infrastructure to your clients, you obviously have to worry about data security. What is the data security strategy that you deploy for your cloud-based infrastructure?

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Laef Olson, CIO of RightNow (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: I see. So you use your own offering for CRM within RightNow? LO: Yes. We use our own system out of the cloud and have our own dedicated team that manages it separately from how we do that for our clients. For our expense management, we

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