Bootstrapping Using Services: eMazzanti CEO Carl Mazzanti (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that you were building more like a toolkit as opposed to a full blown architected product? You have a toolkit that you apply wherever similar problems crop up again. Does that describe the scenario better?

Carl Mazzanti: If you look at where we are 15 years from now, the primary verticals have changed. What problems we’re solving for customers today is different than it was 10 years ago but the email filtering company will most certainly run for a long time. But that is not the current growth story of the organization. That was the growth story for maybe our eighth year in business. In the technology space, your cheese moves around.

Sramana Mitra: I understand that at year five, you came up with this email filtering product. That was one of the major moves that you made in a product direction. It sounds like you’ve made more shifts in your strategy naturally because you’ve been in business for 15 years. At the five year point when you brought the email filtering product into market, what did that do to your business in terms of scaling? Did it double the business? >>>

Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.

Tim has built an excellent company with quite unorthodox financial engineering decisions that have played out very well for him. Read this story to learn some out-of-the-box thinking.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you from? Where were your born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Tim Hentschel: I was from the West Coast originally, from as far as Hawaii where my family owns some hotels and also a large tour operation company. I left Hawaii when I was 13 to move to Carmel, California where I went to high school. Then, I moved east to New York where I attended Cornell University for hospitality management.

Sramana Mitra: What time frame was that? What year did you finish college?

 Tim Hentschel: 2001. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: eMazzanti CEO Carl Mazzanti (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Then what’s the next milestone after moving to that Microsoft strategy or becoming a more general plumbing support beyond security?

Carl Mazzanti: Shared services. Our first level shared services was email filtering. Instead of selling someone a hardware appliance, we moved that to what everyone now calls the cloud. Back then, it was called the shared service.

Sramana Mitra: Whose product were you supporting in that space?

Carl Mazzanti: It’s our own. We filter million plus messages a day.

Sramana Mitra: You actually went into starting your own product at this point?

Carl Mazzanti: We did.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about that. That’s a strategy that we see a lot of services companies use to move to products once they get into a market and develop a customer base. We call it Bootstrapping Using Services. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: eMazzanti CEO Carl Mazzanti (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was it about WatchGuard that made you choose them at that point?

Carl Mazzanti: WatchGuard had been around for 11 years at that point.

Sramana Mitra: They were already quite a while into the market?

Carl Mazzanti: They were established, yes.

Sramana Mitra: That’s why you chose them. You thought you could build a process around them. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: eMazzanti CEO Carl Mazzanti (Part 1)

Carl has bootstrapped eMazzanti using services to close to $10M, maintaining a 20% y-o-y growth rate.

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

Carl Mazzanti: I was born in Pennsylvania. I come from a military family. A joke that I used as a kid was, “My parents moved around a lot, but I always found them.” Because of that, me and my brother are more outgoing than the rest.

I grew up in New Jersey. I went to school in France, Hong Kong, and Georgetown University. After school, I moved back to New Jersey to be around my family and take a leadership development program with Lucent Technologies. From there, they put me through classes at Wharton and NYU to increase my business acumen. >>>

Bootstrapping from Belgium: iText CEO Bruno Lowagie (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What about business strategy? Not every company can, by the nature of their business, grow to $500 million. That’s what the VCs are looking for. By the nature of your business, how big a business can you build?

Bruno Lowagie: If we continue what we are doing now, I don’t think we’re going to be a billion dollar business.

Sramana Mitra: How big a business can you build? $20 million? $50 million?

Bruno Lowagie: The target is to go to $20 million over the next two to three years.

Sramana Mitra: Then what? >>>

Bootstrapping from Belgium: iText CEO Bruno Lowagie (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Belarus is not your own division?

Bruno Lowagie: No, it’s not our own company. It’s a company with a subsidiary in Belgium. We pay the Belgian company but the people who work on iText are in Belarus.

Sramana Mitra: How has revenue ramped?

Bruno Lowagie: I believe that in 2011, we finished with $2.4 million. Then we switched to accounting in Euros. In 2014, we had €5 million.

Sramana Mitra: This is all self-financed? >>>

Bootstrapping from Belgium: iText CEO Bruno Lowagie (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Were you still in Gent?

Bruno Lowagie: I was still in Gent and we’re still in Gent. In 2009, the list was finished and we didn’t find any new customers. We then made a bold move. We changed the old version of iText from the LGPL/MGPL to the AGPL. That’s a more viral license. With LGPL, if you have engine and you build and distribute a car, the car can be commercial. With GPL, you have to distribute the car as GPL too. There was one problem with GPL. For instance, if you build a bus instead of a car, you don’t distribute the bus. You sell tickets for people to use the bus. That’s my analogy with SaaS.

What we saw was Google didn’t distribute software but they built a service and charge for the service. That wasn’t distribution in the context of the GPL. That’s how Google got big because they used all of these GPL software and they didn’t distribute it. They didn’t have to pay for it. I changed iText to AGPL. In AGPL, putting the software on the server is also seen as distribution. If you have software that uses iText under the AGPL, you need to disclose your complete code base as AGPL. >>>