Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 2)

Mark Mader: One of the categories that really took quite some time to move was one of the biggest ones, the Office Suite. As we look at all the different categories that are forming today, many of them have direct analogs to the pre-cloud world. One of the things that we found fascinating was that as Office was trying to figure out what its life in the cloud was going to be, there were two big companies that were going to help shape that. Microsoft being the obvious one and the other one was Google. They are working to bring the traditional Office Suite and the components of Office – Word, Excel, and PowerPoint – to the cloud.

What we found, as a huge opportunity, was if Office was going to be reinvented in the modern day with these mobile devices in the cloud, would it really look as Office was defined 20 years ago? >>>

Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Was the seed that you got enough to get you to the next milestone or did you have to raise?

Brad Peters: We raised seed financing before we started. We couldn’t afford to make the mortgage payment without a little bit of seed financing. We got a little bit of seed financing from some VCs and paid ourselves next to nothing, just enough to keep the lights on.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of raising the seed money, what did you sell the VCs? What was the investment thesis that you sold the VCs?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 1)

This conversation takes our coverage of the cloud-based productivity space further.

Sramana Mitra: Mark, let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as Smartsheet.

Mark Mader: I’m the CEO of Smartsheet. We are a Software-as-a-Service provider that serves about 40,000 businesses today in over 150 countries. The category of solution that we provide is enabling teams and businesses to collaborate on work and projects more effectively. That sounds like a very expansive category but in essence, it is one that is going through tremendous change right now as individuals and companies are trying to figure out how to adjust to working in a networked, cloud-based model. >>>

Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do in 2005 when you started this company?

Brad Peters: We needed to do two things. We had to get some funding because we didn’t have personal savings to be able to survive very long. We needed some seed capital. We spent a lot of time thinking through markets where, with a single sale, we could get enough customer traction to fund the company for a period of time. >>>

Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You were at Siebel through that acquisition?

Brad Peters: No, I wasn’t. You could see the writing on the wall. Analytics was exploding. We were doing really well, but the rest of the company was not doing so well. It was actually shrinking. You could tell that the company was on a collision course with something else. It just wasn’t adapting to newer technologies and architectures. There were a couple of observations that came out of that experience. We had this analytics product that was doing really well, which was basically tackling the idea that normal business people in organizations need data to make decisions and that seemed to be something that was insatiable and was going to continue to grow for some time. There was huge demand for that. >>>

Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 1)

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

Birst’s beginnings had many of the same principles that we espouse in 1M/1M, engaging customers in paying relationships early on being the foremost. Today, the company has raised four rounds of venture capital, and is growing fast as a regular Silicon Valley-style pre-IPO company.

Sramana Mitra: Brad, let’s do your back story first. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lou Guercia, CEO of Scribe Software (Part 5)

But I would think that there’s tremendous opportunity for entrepreneurs to kickoff very specific use cases within an industry or between a couple of technologies and build complete solutions. For example, something around the idea of connecting SMS types of technologies to other forms of broad-based marketing such as email, analytics between SMS campaigns, and web analytics. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lou Guercia, CEO of Scribe Software (Part 4)

My perspective in what’s happening in the cloud is reasonably deep because I’ve been living in it for so long. The three trends that I see at this point won’t probably be new to you. The way that I packaged them might shape what it is we’re doing here for Scribe. Number one is the tsunami that is the cloud. It is growing exponentially faster and especially within the last year. Despite all the negative stories regarding concerns of privacy, security, and the bias against using cloud in certain geographies, there’s an acceptance now that the value of cloud is so overwhelming that it seems like some of these concerns are just eroding. The ubiquity of the cloud is all but assured. That’s the number one driver. >>>