Bootstrap First, Raise Money from Kleiner Perkins Later: William King, CEO of Zephyr Health (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That’s the beauty of this bootstrap first, raise money later model. You’re going out to raise from a position of strength as opposed to weakness. You’re not begging for money. You’re in the negotiating position. In any given time in the market, there is more money chasing fundable deals than fundable solid deals chasing money. If you are in that position where you have bootstrapped to a certain level of validation, success, and customer traction, the likelihood of you calling the shots in negotiation is high.

William King: Exactly. I appreciate that commentary. One of the things that was important to me is our mindset of not creating a one-off product. I’m here in Silicon Valley, but I think I’m unusual in the standpoint that I’m from Princeton and I worked for a traditional company. We’ve always focused on truly building a company. That is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned at J&J. The credo, culture, and this idea of creating sustainability—these are core tenets that made a deep impression on me. What I wanted to do was go out and >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money from Kleiner Perkins Later: William King, CEO of Zephyr Health (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the customer segment that you were going after and what was the pain point that you were solving for them?

William King: We’re a technology company first that is focused foremost on life sciences. Simply put, we wrangle this universe of Big Data and put it to use for pharmaceutical companies. What does that mean in practical terms? It means there’s a lot of weakly connected and even disconnected data that exists in the health ecosystem. A great example would be information about physicians, patients, and hospitals. You’d think that there would be strong correlations. What we found is that data is weakly connected or not connected at all. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money from Kleiner Perkins Later: William King, CEO of Zephyr Health (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year does that bring us up to?

William King: I left London at the end of 2008.  It was great to learn about business, marketing, and management. The other thing that I’ve always been interested in is the world of technology, given all the devices that we have. The thing that really struck me at J&J was the staggering amount of data that we would purchase and generate. Obviously, a company of 120,000 employees and $60 billion in revenue will produce a tremendous amount of data. When I was in London, I became very fascinated with data. I’d always pay attention to data throughout my career. In fact, one of the things that I’ve learned early on is how critical data is in decision-making. Oftentimes at a big pharmaceutical company, you don’t know the outcome of your decision for many years. Think about drug development. It’s a 10-year cycle. It’s very expensive. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money from Kleiner Perkins Later: William King, CEO of Zephyr Health (Part 1)

Continuing on our theme of ‘Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later’, here’s William King’s story of building a robust company in the healthcare industry, now funded by Kleiner Perkins.

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

William King: I was born in Princeton, New Jersey. I lived in Princeton until I was 18. I’m the oldest of six children. That’s a little bit unique in that we had a lot of action in the house. The age span was actually a difference of 10 years, which was pretty interesting and pretty heroic, now that I’m a parent myself. As a child, part of my experience in growing up was leading my siblings and helping them to participate. Kids look up to their older brothers and sisters. A lot of what was instilled in me at a very young age is this notion of making good choices, collaboration, and the idea that people are paying attention to the things that you’re doing. >>>

Bootstrapping in Minnesota: Praful Saklani, CEO of Pramata (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is at the heart of that? What do you think is the core competency that you’ve built in your product that is enabling you to branch out into upsell opportunities in the enterprise and even work yourself into additional use cases?

Praful Saklani: There’s a couple of things. First of all, I would say that there are a lot of tools out there in the enterprise right now. There’s a lot of data that’s out there. In terms of having accurate and reliable information, data integrity, in particular, is a lot scarcer than we think. >>>

Bootstrapping to $55 Million from Rural Minnesota: Tom Fallenstein, CEO of Fun.com (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: So far, what you’ve done is domain acquisitions. The three acquisitions you talked about are domain acquisitions. While they are high numbers for domains, relatively speaking, they are small numbers. You could also grow fast by acquiring a business, not just domains? Is that something that you would consider?

Tom Fallenstein: Yes, that’s one of the things that we’re looking at currently. >>>

Bootstrapping in Minnesota: Praful Saklani, CEO of Pramata (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How did you find these angels? What was the logic of these angels being in this company?

Praful Saklani: Among the people that we brought on as early angels, one was the former CEO of SAP America. He’s actually listed on our website as an advisor. He was involved from a very early stage in the company. With his knowledge in enterprise software, he said, “This is a gap. I know that there’s a big need for this.” Through our networks and the network of the people that we brought on as angels, we have many people with CFO backgrounds and a couple of people with COO backgrounds. All of them have wrestled with this problem in their careers. That was really the criteria—finding people who were passionate about the business and leveraging our networks.

Sramana Mitra: I’m surprised that I didn’t hear any lawyer in that group.
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Bootstrapping to $55 Million from Rural Minnesota: Tom Fallenstein, CEO of Fun.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Besides fun.com, have you done anything else in the last 18 months that is worth discussing?

Tom Fallenstein: We spend most of our time and money on our internal culture and infrastructure. We put in a million dollar automation system to help put out 35,000 orders in a single day. That’s where a lot of our money and time is going—making sure that we can fulfill all the customer orders that come through and that we have the fastest shipping and best customer experience. >>>