Bootstrapping to 25 Million, Then Raising A 23 Million Series A: Coverity Cofounder Andy Chou (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How does your business break down within your clients’ structure? Andy Chou: A majority of our business comes from embedded software. That includes consumer electronics, military and aerospace, medical devices, mobile, and verticals like that. We do have ISVs as well, and we are just starting to crack into the enterprise IT space.

Bootstrapping to 25 Million, Then Raising A 23 Million Series A: Coverity Cofounder Andy Chou (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the next major event after you raised your funding? Andy Chou: We had the financial crisis, which hit every company pretty hard. That caused us to re-evaluate our company. The good thing is our customers stuck with us because they saw the value we provided even in the dire economic environment.

Bootstrapping to 25 Million, Then Raising A 23 Million Series A: Coverity Cofounder Andy Chou (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you go about raising funding? Andy Chou: We talked to all of the VCs interested in this space and told them that if they wanted to invest in us that we would only consider certain types of deals. We presented them with our range of acceptable terms and indicated that if

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping to 25 Million, Then Raising A 23 Million Series A: Coverity Cofounder Andy Chou (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: From a computer science point of view what was it that you were doing? How were you solving the problem? Andy Chou: In the world of static analysis the idea is to take the source code for a program, dissect it and digest it, and then analyze all of the different paths through

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping to 25 Million, Then Raising A 23 Million Series A: Coverity Cofounder Andy Chou (Part 1)

Andy Chou is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Coverity, a development testing company. Prior to co-founding Coverity, Andy was instrumental in developing the core intellectual property behind the Coverity platform while earning his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University. He has also developed key innovations in Coverity’s industry-leading static analysis technology. He

Read Full Article »

Making Millions in Alabama: SlimWare Utilities CEO Chris Cope (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: You clearly entered this business with a tremendous amount of knowledge of affiliate marketing. Can you talk about how you have used that skill set for customer acquisition for SlimWare Utilities? Chris Cope: We had an affiliate program, but we are looking now for channel partners. Our overall strategy is brand equity. We

Read Full Article »

Making Millions in Alabama: SlimWare Utilities CEO Chris Cope (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is your premium strategy versus free product strategy? Chris Cope: Our free products are designed to give consumers a chance to try the product. The premium cleaning product is $34.95, and we have around 100,000 customers. Our premium drive app sells at $29.95 and while it does not have as many users,

Read Full Article »

Making Millions in Alabama: SlimWare Utilities CEO Chris Cope (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What drove your decision to focus on PC drivers as the first aspect of SlimWare Utilities? Chris Cope: There were a lot of people who needed a solution. If the driver solution worked well when no other products did, we would attract the hardcore PC enthusiast group to use our other utilities as

Read Full Article »