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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
serial entrepreneur
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
Launching and Scaling a Security Startup During an Out-of-Favor Time: HyTrust President Eric Chiu (Part 3)
Sramana: During that 10-month time between starting HyTrust and getting funded, you still had living expenses. Did you guys have any financing? How did you live? What did you accomplish with that $200,000? Eric Chiu: We did our own seed financing and followed the classic bootstrapped model. We spent only about half of the money
Launching and Scaling a Security Startup During an Out-of-Favor Time: HyTrust President Eric Chiu (Part 2)
Sramana: What led you to Hytrust? Eric Chiu: I was running sales and business development for Cemaphore. I was in the process of evaluating some other job offers and different startups and I had the board members from those companies calling me to figure out what decision I had made. During that period one of
Launching and Scaling a Security Startup During an Out-of-Favor Time: HyTrust President Eric Chiu (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Eric Chiu is the co-founder and president of HyTrust, a virtualization security company. He has more than 13 years of experience in high-tech management and finance. Most recently he was the VP of sales and business development for Cemaphore Systems. Prior to Cemaphore, he led business
CEO Transition, Founder Liquidity, and More: Bill Daniel, CEO AllWebLeads (Part 7)
Sramana: A private liquidity exit can be bad if the founder is crucial to the success of the business. I saw a similar situation where the founder did not allow a team to get built around him. I am surprised the investors allowed him to have that liquidity event. They needed to raise money, and
CEO Transition, Founder Liquidity, and More: Bill Daniel, CEO AllWebLeads (Part 6)
Sramana: Early-stage entrepreneurs are always wondering about the transition from an entrepreneur-run business to an outsider-run business. What are your thoughts? Bill Daniel: My first experience with this was Oracle, when it was a small company known as Relational Software Inc. Larry Ellison is legendary, but in those days he was just Larry. I watched
CEO Transition, Founder Liquidity, and More: Bill Daniel, CEO AllWebLeads (Part 5)
Sramana: How did the transition between Sergient and AllWebLeads happen? Bill Daniel: I was contacted by Ross Garber, one of the founders at Vignette, who had been contacted by two young guys in their twenties who owned AllWebLeads. They were looking to create a board of directors and had created a profitable company via bootstrapping.
CEO Transition, Founder Liquidity, and More: Bill Daniel, CEO AllWebLeads (Part 4)
Sramana: How long did you stay at Vignette? Bill Daniel: I left Vignette in 2003. I was there for just over five years. At that point, I took some time off. I spent a year working on my golf game. There is something about starting a company from scratch or working with a fledgling company
