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HOT TOPICS
- 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
Building a Fat Startup: From Israel to Silicon Valley, Qwilt CEO Alon Maor’s Journey (Part 4)
Sramana: You went to market with 15 carriers. At what point did you start getting them to pay for products? Alon Maor: We got them to start paying once we had the initial product. That means it had to be a carrier-grade product. They will evaluate the product in a lab. We had a few
Building a Fat Startup: From Israel to Silicon Valley, Qwilt CEO Alon Maor’s Journey (Part 3)
Sramana: These days investors do not fund concepts. They only fund businesses. That means there needs to be customers buying a product. Alon Maor: In our case, since we are approaching the carrier space which is a large software-based capital intensive project, the incubation we did was through 15 worldwide carrier references. We had endorsements
Building a Fat Startup: From Israel to Silicon Valley, Qwilt CEO Alon Maor’s Journey (Part 2)
Sramana: One of the big problems that we see in big startup teams is that people just meet and try to do a startup together. That’s like getting married after a one-night stand. It’s a disaster. Alon Maor: What I found out about the team is that it is all about the people. You have
Building a Fat Startup: From Israel to Silicon Valley, Qwilt CEO Alon Maor’s Journey (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Alon Maor is the CEO and co-founder of Qwilt, a company that builds products to allow network carriers to create a universal video fabric without interruption or changes to content provider or network infrastructures. Prior to Qwilt, Alon oversaw the development and operations of the Service
Launching and Scaling a Security Startup During an Out-of-Favor Time: HyTrust President Eric Chiu (Part 7)
Sramana: What about your company team? When you started you where you the CEO? Eric Chiu: When we started out I was CEO and Renata was VP of Product Management. We hired on a CTO soon after who I consider a quasi founder. We then hired a Sales VP from VMWare. Jim Gannon is still
Launching and Scaling a Security Startup During an Out-of-Favor Time: HyTrust President Eric Chiu (Part 6)
Sramana: How much money did you raise from VCs? Eric Chiu: We raised 5.4 million dollars in Series A. In the end we also converted our 200,000 dollars into that Series A. That allowed us to start paying ourselves again. I think you have to have that period where you are not making any money.
Launching and Scaling a Security Startup During an Out-of-Favor Time: HyTrust President Eric Chiu (Part 5)
Sramana: Raising money like that is very difficult these days. You were able to get VCs to invest in a concept and that is not common. What was it about your situation that enabled you to clinch the opportunity? Eric Chiu: First, I think we went to the right firms. Trident committed to the term
Launching and Scaling a Security Startup During an Out-of-Favor Time: HyTrust President Eric Chiu (Part 4)
Sramana: Let me probe a bit on that because you bring up an important point. Can you use your own value proposition and investment thesis for the Series A? What was your investment thesis, and why were VCs telling you no? In my experience of fundraising, VCs typically give you good feedback, and if you