From Y Combinator to Customer Traction and $50 Million in Financing: MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: When you raised the $35 million, how many customers did you have?

Eric Frenkiel: I don’t recall the exact numbers, but it was around a dozen customers at that point.

Sramana Mitra: Were these large companies? What kind of customers are we talking?

Eric Frenkiel: They were all logos that anyone would recognize. One of the things that we also did was not to focus on selling to startups or early stage companies. We really wanted to prove that the technology had legs by delivering value to companies like Comcast and Samsung.

Sramana Mitra: You went after the regular enterprise customers and not the Lady Gaga kind of customers? >>>

From Y Combinator to Customer Traction and $50 Million in Financing: MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did they find out about you?

Eric Frenkiel: We were introduced to investor networks. There were investors who knew the startup needed a really strong database product. They put us in touch. We gave them a demo and they knew that was going to help them develop fast. That was our first customer. It was a lot of fun.

Sramana Mitra: What happened next?

Eric Frenkiel: That takes us to the summer of 2011. We concluded the first feature set and we launched in June of 2012. In six months, we had more than 10,000 developers using the software. We immediately saw the market resonance about in-memory database that was fully relational. It wasn’t the full vision though. This was a single-box version of the software. If you’re happy with the product at launch, then you’ve launched too late. We knew that we had launched an MVP. That was the first step. >>>

From Y Combinator to Customer Traction and $50 Million in Financing: MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is the go-to market strategy?

Eric Frenkiel: We started the company with zero code. Since we had that ability to focus on what we wanted to build into the product, we’ve been able to build enterprise-grade features into MemSQL in a very short period of time. Our hurried go-to market strategy is building our field teams to sell to our most likely customers in the Fortune 500 segment that need high performance solutions for their problems.

Sramana Mitra: You went to YCombinator in 2010?

Eric Frenkiel: We started in the winter of 2011 class, which kicked off at the beginning of 2011. >>>

From Y Combinator to Customer Traction and $50 Million in Financing: MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the rationale behind relational database at this point?

Eric Frenkiel: That’s a great question. In fact, it’s one of the first questions our investors asked us, “Why are you building a relational database? The entire world is going to NoSQL.” We had a very contrarian view at that time, which was that the world will remain SQL. We have proven time and time again with every new vendor effectively reinventing the wheel with SQL. You cannot analyze your data if you do not have SQL access.

To get to the real point, everyone knows SQL. It’s a universal language. It’s lasting power is going to be measured in centuries. We have a tremendous belief that it is the easiest way to analyze your data which is why it’s been the most successful implementation for any database over the last 40 years. >>>

From Y Combinator to Customer Traction and $50 Million in Financing: MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at Facebook?

Eric Frenkiel: Not very long, it was for 10 months in total. It was an amazing opportunity. We ultimately left Facebook because we had a bigger opportunity that we wanted to build. That was MemSQL. We joined in 2010 and left in early 2011. That was a big decision because an extra two months would have meant a quarter of the shares, but it happened to coincide with YCombinator, which have fixed start dates. If you don’t start on the fixed date, you’d miss the class. In many ways, it was an easier decision because you just walk away. You look forward to the next venture.

Sramana Mitra: You took your idea and applied to YCombinator?

Eric Frenkiel: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You had co-founders? >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Colorado: InteliSecure CTO Chuck Bloomquist (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is your plan going forward? You’re about $16 million. The market has appetite for what you bring to the table. Is it just basically doing more of the same thing? Is that an accurate summary of what your game plan is?

Chuck Bloomquist: I definitely want to continue and expand in different directions. As you can imagine, the people who want the data continue to get creative with how they are going to get it. Today we see most organizations trying to present this in a retroactive space. If you think about malware and antivirus, it’s all based on signature definition today. Somebody writes an exploit and exploits somebody’s network. They call Symantec and say, “We’ll create a signature for it.” In our opinion, that’s too late. If you can define what it is that’s relevant to the organization, you now have a tool that you can use to look for it. Where are we going next? >>>

Don’t Pivot Too Soon: ADARA Co-Founder and CTO Charles Mi (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: They’re all doing this. They’re all part of your marketplace now.

Charles Mi: Yes. ADARA marketplace contains a lot of the travel technology companies, rental cars, and hotels. They have 100% control over how the data is being used. By putting transparency and control in place, the data suppliers have a lot of confidence that the data won’t be misused.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. In terms of building the company, you switched in 2008 to this travel data mode. Now, it’s coming up to seven years of executing on this business plan. You said you raised three rounds of financing?

Charles Mi: Since 2008, yes. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Colorado: InteliSecure CTO Chuck Bloomquist (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m asking a very specific question. Maybe I should ask you a broader question. Is this still a services company or is this a product company now?

Chuck Bloomquist: We are a services company. Products that we sell are developed by a variety of different organizations – Symantec, RSA, and Cisco. They have these tools. What we do is we build processes and people around these products so that organizations can see how data is moving and control how the data moves through the organization.

Sramana Mitra: How big a company are you today?

Chuck Bloomquist: We are a $16 million company with about 100 employees. >>>