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Building a Fat Startup with a Massive Patent Portfolio: Cleversafe Founder Chris Gladwin (Part 7)

Posted on Tuesday, Jul 29th

Sramana: What are some of the metrics of the business today? Chris Gladwin: We are doing many tens of millions of revenue. We have 130 employees and have raised over $100 million in total. We have built a very large patent portfolio. We have 186 patents. We had six issued last Tuesday. We typically get

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Building a Fat Startup with a Massive Patent Portfolio: Cleversafe Founder Chris Gladwin (Part 6)

Posted on Monday, Jul 28th

Sramana: If you were to pinpoint the key positioning points in your approach that are dramatically better than your competitors, what would that be? Chris Gladwin: To summarise it succinctly, they don’t virtualize the data. They make actual copies of data, which means the data inherits the properties of the physical world. It can be

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Building a Fat Startup with a Massive Patent Portfolio: Cleversafe Founder Chris Gladwin (Part 5)

Posted on Sunday, Jul 27th

Sramana: How much money were you able to raise before you had revenue? Chris Gladwin: Something to the order of $10 million. Sramana: I talk with a lot of entrepreneurs and I have found that those who build capital intensive products requiring substantial capital investments were able to do it if they had either prior

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Building a Fat Startup with a Massive Patent Portfolio: Cleversafe Founder Chris Gladwin (Part 4)

Posted on Saturday, Jul 26th

Sramana: You said you funded the seed round yourself. What were the milestones and accomplishments of that seed round? Chris Gladwin: I used not only capital but in the early rounds I was also able to use equity as a way to compensate initial employees. You can provide equity to people when you form the

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Building a Fat Startup with a Massive Patent Portfolio: Cleversafe Founder Chris Gladwin (Part 3)

Posted on Friday, Jul 25th

Sramana: What came next? Chris Gladwin: I started Cleversafe in 2004. Sramana: What was the core idea driving Cleversafe? Chris Gladwin: There were two aspects. First and foremost was the market. At that time, it appeared that the demand for data storage was going to grow rapidly and that has indeed been the case. It

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Building a Fat Startup with a Massive Patent Portfolio: Cleversafe Founder Chris Gladwin (Part 2)

Posted on Thursday, Jul 24th

Sramana: What did you do after Lockheed? Chris Gladwin: Lockheed was a very good experience because I got to learn what it meant to be a customer of technology products, particularly an enterprise customer. I essentially spent my time evaluating products. Eventually, I felt that I wanted to start building the technology instead of evaluating

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Building a Fat Startup with a Massive Patent Portfolio: Cleversafe Founder Chris Gladwin (Part 1)

Posted on Wednesday, Jul 23rd

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  There aren’t many sub $100 million technology companies that can boast of a strong patent portfolio. Cleversafe is that rare exception, and hence, a tremendously valuable company with robust revenue growth in a $20 billion market. Sramana: Chris, let’s start with your background. Where are you

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Bootstrapping Using Services: Krishna Kumar, CEO of AppOrchid (Part 7)

Posted on Tuesday, Jul 22nd

Sramana: How have you structured your technology to support these various use cases? Krishna Kumar: Our app building platform lets you build apps quickly for these various conditions. We use an agent-based model. That is a cool way of predicting human response conditions. We are mimicking the human intelligence response to different conditions and using

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