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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
Sunny Gupta
Building a Fat Startup: Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: As long as you are delivering and executing on what you said you were going to deliver on, there is no shortage of capital. In your case, you have delivered a product. You’ve had customers. Your pricing model is validated. Your business model is validated. You’re ramping up well. These kinds of deals
Building a Fat Startup: Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: You didn’t go after the Goldman kind of customers from where you picked up the idea. You actually went after the smaller customers to get a feel of the product. Sunny Gupta: I wanted to get the product and security model validated. I was talking to the Goldmans of the world all along,
Building a Fat Startup: Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Your point is well-taken but you have to be able to afford it. You’re starting with a $7 million Series A. Not all entrepreneurs have the luxury of starting with a $7 million Series A. Sunny Gupta: I understand. I have myself been there when I started, which was literally two years prior
Building a Fat Startup: Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta (Part 4)
Sunny Gupta: Then came the fund raising. Greylock and Madrona were my prime investors. I started talking to them as I was validating the idea in the summer of 2007. I think their perspective was, “We have a lot of faith in you. Great teams can take a bad idea and make it into a
Building a Fat Startup: Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: You got this input from the CIO of Goldman Sachs. Did you go talk to other CIOs in the financial sector or other CIOs in general? Sunny Gupta: Yes. I came home back to Seattle. On a long flight back, I thought, “This is the most ridiculous idea I’ve heard because it’s too
Building a Fat Startup: Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta (Part 2)
Sunny Gupta: I left IBM and joined a local Seattle-based venture company called Performant as a business guy. I stayed there for 18 months and sold that business to Mercury Interactive. Once I went to Mercury, I transitioned into a product role. That was incredible because a lot of my learnings around being close to
Building a Fat Startup: Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. One more look at what it takes to build a fat startup. Sunny Gupta discusses Apptio. The company raised a $7 million series A to get started, and then went to raise over $130 million thus far. Sramana Mitra: Sunny, let’s start at the very beginning.
