Don’t Pivot Too Soon: ADARA Co-Founder and CTO Charles Mi (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Hilton was paying US Airways every time they were accessing a data set and you were getting a share of that revenue. Was that your business model?

Charles Mi: We get paid and share it with US Airways. Just like a consumer who’s purchasing from Amazon, you have to pay Amazon. Amazon then gives the money to the merchant.

Sramana Mitra: So the transaction completes on your side and you do the collection.

Charles Mi: Yes. >>>

Don’t Pivot Too Soon: ADARA Co-Founder and CTO Charles Mi (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to 2008. You decided to do this vertical solution for the travel agency. Who were the first customers that you went after and who bought into your value proposition?

Charles Mi: The first customer we went after was US Airways, partly due to the personal relationship that Layton has with the US Airways marketing team. Part of it was that 2008 was a difficult time for airlines. Not a lot of people were travelling. A lot of airlines had gone for bankruptcy protection. That was also the time when the predominant airlines were looking for other sources of revenue. If you remember, that’s when they started charging you for bags. They started charging your first bag. They also charged your second bag. You also don’t get food for free anymore. Airlines were having trouble in sustaining themselves. They were looking for different ways to get their revenues.

That was the perfect storm for us. >>>

Don’t Pivot Too Soon: ADARA Co-Founder and CTO Charles Mi (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What happened to that company?

Charles Mi: We lasted for three and a half years. It was a very interesting idea, but we didn’t really discover the business potential. We also tried to make different things at a time instead of focusing on one thing. We were doing three different products at the same time. We were also doing advertising and analytics.

What happened was some of the key data sources that we had went away, one of which was Myspace. We crawl the profiles and also get lots of information from blogging platforms like Live Journal, Bazinga, and also MSN 360. A lot of these blogging platforms also went away. Our data sources dropped significantly, making our search engine a little insignificant. >>>

Don’t Pivot Too Soon: ADARA Co-Founder and CTO Charles Mi (Part 1)

The Lean Startup methodology has created a frenzy to pivot. Entrepreneurs seek instant gratification, and when they don’t get it, they rush to pivot. The market is strewn with false negativities as a result, because entrepreneurs don’t have the patience to stay with a concept, develop it, and sell it.

ADARA is a counter-example that pivoted, but to an idea that took a lot of lengthy selling to gain ground.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? >>>

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn with Services from Utah: Dave Elkington, CEO of InsideSales.com (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Are you building the whole organization in Utah?

Dave Elkington: Yes. Here’s why. I’m maniacal about that. I drive everybody crazy. So much of a business, especially in hyper growth, happens ad hoc. It happens in the hallway. It happens in ad hoc meetings. If you distribute your leadership team, you impair them. That strategy is so fluid. It’s so quickly evolving that if you don’t cluster your key strategic leaders, you can’t be successful.

Sramana Mitra: I don’t want to get into this discussion but we have a completely global organization because of the nature of what we do. It works perfectly for us.

Dave Elkington: There are scenarios where it doesn’t work. There will be a day when I don’t need all of those key leaders here in Utah.

Sramana Mitra: I think the downside of building a startup at Silicon Valley these days is the talent war is crazy. That is not an easy game to play. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Evariant CEO Bill Moschella (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of your own customer acquisition, is it all direct selling? Do you have a field sales force?

Bill Moschella: Yes, we have field sales and partner channel as well. We have an awesome partner channel team who are from Cloudera, Microsoft, and Oracle. They are now on-board and doing an amazing job.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of your organization, are you still headquartered in Connecticut?

Bill Moschella: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How big is the company in terms of team?

Bill Moschella: At this point, we’re probably around 200 people all over the country. >>>

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn with Services from Utah: Dave Elkington, CEO of InsideSales.com (Part 6)

Dave Elkington: Everybody who was willing to give us term sheets were great firms but what mattered to me was the cultural fit. Ultimately, we did $35 million from US Venture Partners. It was because I had Steve Krausz and Dafina, who were one of the newer partners. They were the right people. I loved their experience. I liked their engagement. They weren’t the highest valuation by a significant amount but they were the right people. They gave me the exact same terms that Mark Gorenberg gave me.

It allowed me to put much more fuel into the fire. By this point, I was surrounding myself with a lot of advisors that have done this before. >>>

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn with Services from Utah: Dave Elkington, CEO of InsideSales.com (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I actually have a BMW 3 Series that I categorically lease. I change them every three years.

Dave Elkington: It’s uncanny. Every time I give the example, there’s a 90% overlap. People cluster with other people who behave similarly. What I needed to build was a massive engine that collected all of those profiles of people. The epiphany came to me on how to collect this much data. It’s not a little data. The concept is I needed to know everything about everybody. If I know massive amounts about most people, I should still be able to predict the people I don’t know about and how they’ll behave in similar situations. >>>