Serial Entrepreneur David Steinberg’s Four-Startup Journey (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I agree with you. Those are character traits that make great entrepreneurs. Without that, you’re not going to sustain because it takes a lot of work and energy. I’m trying to provide a framework that people can apply to ideas.

David Steinberg: What I was going to say is the things that made me a great entrepreneur were those things. But the thing that drove me to start my first company was I thought mobile phones were cool. It was something that I really liked. I do think that entrepreneurs picking something that they’re into is going to make it a much easier process. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Money is flowing freely now. There is no shortage of money especially for late stage deals. People are raising money like crazy.

Vineet Jain: It’s a sign of times. My Series D came in nine days.

SramanaMitra: It’s good and bad. Some of it is good, because the good companies have plenty of opportunities.

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Serial Entrepreneur David Steinberg’s Four-Startup Journey (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: That is a great resume. Can you tell me the story in a way that is useful for people to learn from?

David Steinberg: Here’s the learning. I do what’s called triangulation whenever I’m starting a business. I look for three different data points that say either the same thing or the opposite thing but lead to the same conclusion. What led me to believe that moving wireless sales from offline to online were a bunch of things? The first thing is I read a tremendous amount as the best way to learn is through read publications and online. I read an article in Advertising Age magazine that said that the Internet is going to explode and Internet marketing is going to grow at 25% a year. Two days earlier, I had read an article online that said the Internet was going to explode and content was going to grow at 17,000% a year. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain (Part 4)

Vineet Jain: Secondly and this is very important, we have storage companies as partners. When I started, I worked with Netgear here in Sta. Clara. Then I went to NetApp in 2011 as we grew and the customers were saying, “Who’s Net Gear?” The idea here is that the on-premise storage companies look at Egnyte as a complement. I will never stand up in a conference and make a stupid statement like, “EMC and NetApp’s days are numbered, because everything is going to the cloud.” That’s not a reality. That’s just good to get a sound bite out and journalists love that.

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Serial Entrepreneur David Steinberg’s Four-Startup Journey (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Was this a company that you financed in any way or was it self-financed?

David Steinberg: I maxed out my credit cards and tried to get some money from my family. They would not give me any initially. I then went to my stepfather and said, “This is what I want to do.  I have this plan. Would you help me?” He said, “Absolutely not. You’re way too young to do this. Go to work for somebody for five years in the business and then I’ll lend you whatever you need.” I didn’t want to wait but we grew the business so quickly that within six months, we were already doing over a million a month. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happens to Box and Dropbox? Do they get washed-up by Google and Microsoft providing this for free?

Vineet Jain: I will not pontificate to say what happens to them but I can share the general trend. Two years back with the cloud-only play, whether you were pitching to the SMB or enterprise, you could get away with an average pricing per seat of $25 to $35 per seat. Those days are long gone. Now, when you pitch to the same customer with the same solution, you are dealing with a price point which is going down to $6 to $8 per seat per month. In some large volume cases when you’re dealing with 10,000 seat deployment, it gets down to $3 to $4. >>>

Serial Entrepreneur David Steinberg’s Four-Startup Journey (Part 1)

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

Today’s entrepreneurial landscape is full of serial entrepreneurs who start really young and build company after company. Some succeed and some fail. David’s four companies have all been successful.

Sramana Mitra: David, where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What’s the back story?

David Steinberg: I grew up in New York City.

Sramana Mitra: Was there any entrepreneurship in your DNA?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: From a user point of view, are you trying to hide that complexity and make it seamless for the user, but the enterprise policy determines whether it’s going to be stored on a public cloud server or a private cloud server. Is that what you’re saying? >>>