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
scott sellers
20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch to the other side of the business. What go-to-market strategy did you go with that? Scott Sellers: The product is called Platform Prime. It is based on open source technology. It’s the same OpenJDK that the open-source Zulu comes from. To that, we add proprietary elements that make it better. It
20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: The open-source was a commercial open source business model where the free product was lead generating for a subscription-based offering? Scott Sellers: Right. We still have free downloads of the open-source software. We encourage people to use it in an unrestricted manner. The business monetization model is selling commercial support services, which include
20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: From 2002 to 2008, you already had a lot of VC in the company. It’s already six years, so the VCs are starting to get antsy. How did you handle that? Scott Sellers: It was one of the most challenging aspects. We needed to change our investor base. The current investors had invested
20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to get the first product out? Scott Sellers: It always takes longer than you think, especially in the world of hardware and chip design. The first product was released in the early part of 2005. It was a good solid three years. Sramana Mitra: Did you have
20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: How did you spin the Java story? Scott Sellers: The other two founders worked for a company called Shasta Networks. This was in the late 90s. It was a cable and DSL model termination system. They built an appliance to do this. They put together the hardware and wrote a ton of software
20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What was your role in that founding team? Scott Sellers: I was in the hardware engineering team. I managed the team and did a lot of coding and Verilog to do the chip design. We did all of our backend chip design in-house. I sat on the Board and raised money. It’s always
20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 1)
VCs invest in startups that go from zero to $100M in 5 to 7 years. It has taken Azul almost 20 years to make that journey. Scott discusses the pivots and strategic shifts that have made the journey possible. With patience and persistence, and with an excellent two-pronged Open Source strategy, Scott has built Azul
