Sramana Mitra: The first year of being in the market was in 2012? Hannu Verkasalo: 2013 was when we started building the product. End of 2014 was when we launched the product. Now we have had two full years in the market. Sramana Mitra: When did Cisco come on board? Hannu Verkasalo: They came on
Sramana Mitra: Let’s take this step by step. You had this conversation with Facebook and it triggered a thought in your mind in 2012. Hannu Verkasalo: Yes. Sramana Mitra: How did you get the company off the ground? You had capital, so you could start it on your own. Hannu Verkasalo: That’s right. I put
Sramana Mitra: There are lots of lead customers, which is really important for a startup. Hannu Verkasalo: You’re right. Let’s talk about the incident on mobile. Many of these companies including Google and Facebook want to support new innovations and new ideas. In many cases, they use you because they want to bring something new
Sramana Mitra: How many investors did you have and how much money did you raise? Hannu Verkasalo: We raised $2 million. Sramana Mitra: From investors in Finland? Hannu Verkasalo: Yes, we had two investors from Finland and a couple of angels. I put in quite a bit of money. Knowing what I know now and
Sramana Mitra: The product idea was based on what you were doing for Nokia and what you wanted to bring for the other mobile operators, right? Hannu Verkasalu: Exactly. Sramana Mitra: This is now the post-iPhone era. Hannu Verkasalu: Yes. Now more and more companies were interested in mobile being a medium for content and
Hannu has done three companies, including the one that he is doing now – Verto Analytics. We love stories of successful entrepreneurs from different parts of the world, and this one, from Finland is a wonderful one! Sramana Mitra: Tell me where you come from, where you were born, raised, and in what kind of
Sramana Mitra: Help me understand with a use case. Let’s say Uber wants to go global using your technology, what specifically happens? How does the technology help Uber go global? Moshe Vaknin: Let’s say Uber goes to India. Then they’d say, “I’d like to have 300,000 users in the next six months.” With our technology
Moshe Vaknin: In the beginning of 2013, we did a shift. We decided that we wanted to focus on B2B. We didn’t change the core but rather than having an app, we said, “Let’s get to publishers who have a lot of users. Through their content, we’ll recommend to users.” Earlier, the dream was to build my