Sramana Mitra: How were you addressing the blacklist issue? How were you detecting if something wasn’t blacklisted but was a problem? How were you figuring that out? Rob Cheng: What we’re doing is the opposite. We’re creating a white list of everything that’s good. We’re looking for every single good program that we can find
Sramana Mitra: Were you hiring these developers in South Carolina? Rob Cheng: We used Monster.com. Back then, that was a way to hire people. So I would just look for the best people and for the skill. I would find them wherever I could. As it ends up, a couple of our developers ended up
Sramana Mitra: So, just give some metrics of how it took off. What kind of numbers were you doing? How long did it take you to get to a million in revenue for example? Rob Cheng: In the very beginning, we had no revenue model. Revenue was not important at that point in time. It’s
Sramana Mitra: It was a software-driven diagnostic tool. You were running a piece of software from the internet onto that machine. Rob Cheng: Yes. It was using a technology by Microsoft called ActiveX. It was quite similar to cloud computing. We stored all the results there. We were able to track which type of computers
Rob Cheng: I got to know Ted very well throughout that period of time. Ultimately, I introduced him to my friend in Colombia. They started to do business together. Another thing that happened that was very interesting was that Texas Instruments decided to go and stop the production of the PC. I’ve become friends with
If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course. Rob figured out the joys of virtual companies back in 1999. Today, he runs a 65-person virtual company that makes $20 million in revenue. Wonderful story. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born,