Zendesk IPO Underscores Momentum in Cloud CRM

A recent report released by Markets and Markets estimates the global cloud computing spend to grow to $121.1 billion by 2015, recording a compounded annual growth rate of 26% over the period 2010 through 2015.  Another report by Market Research Media expects strong growth within cloud computing to continue. The report projects a 30% annual growth rate over the five year period from 2015 with the market expected to be worth $270 billion by 2020.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Don DeLoach, CEO of Infobright (Part 1)

Everyone in Big Data is anticipating the Internet of Things trend. Don discusses it as well, along with other issues.

Sramana Mitra: Don, let’s start with introducing our audience to you as well as Infobright.

Don DeLoach: I’m the President and CEO of Infobright. Infobright is a company that offers a purpose-built platform for storing and analyzing machine-generated data. If you had to classify us, it would be the column-based analytic database. There’s a number of clever offerings that I have a high respect for. We are not of the belief that there’s one silver bullet and nobody else does anything good. >>>

Building a Fat Startup: Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Your point is well-taken but you have to be able to afford it. You’re starting with a $7 million Series A. Not all entrepreneurs have the luxury of starting with a $7 million Series A.

Sunny Gupta: I understand. I have myself been there when I started, which was literally two years prior to that. I was running on angel money, but my fundraising experience was different. I had angels who had written me $200,000 checks. >>>

Building a Fat Startup: Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta (Part 4)

Sunny Gupta: Then came the fund raising. Greylock and Madrona were my prime investors. I started talking to them as I was validating the idea in the summer of 2007. I think their perspective was, “We have a lot of faith in you. Great teams can take a bad idea and make it into a great market and execution. Bad teams can take a great idea and screw that up.” They had a lot of conviction and faith in me but also had enough conviction in the idea. When it was time for fund raising, I ended up going back to these people and went through a partnering agenda. I could have funded the company on my own at that stage, but I decided to raise more money than less. We closed the first round Series A in a matter of weeks. That was a $7 million round. It was co-led by Greylock and Madrona. Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz were angel investors.

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Building a Fat Startup: Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You got this input from the CIO of Goldman Sachs. Did you go talk to other CIOs in the financial sector or other CIOs in general?

Sunny Gupta: Yes. I came home back to Seattle. On a long flight back, I thought, “This is the most ridiculous idea I’ve heard because it’s too easy. Why hasn’t it been done?”  Having sold to a lot of large customers, I felt that building a company just based upon one customer’s data point is a disaster. That’s where a lot of entrepreneurs go wrong. I believe in deep customer validations and whatever I did next had to be a big category idea. To do that, I wanted to go talk to at least 40 IT leaders. >>>

Building a Fat Startup: Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta (Part 2)

Sunny Gupta: I left IBM and joined a local Seattle-based venture company called Performant as a business guy. I stayed there for 18 months and sold that business to Mercury Interactive. Once I went to Mercury, I transitioned into a product role. That was incredible because a lot of my learnings around being close to the customer started applying there. >>>

Building a Fat Startup: Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta (Part 1)

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

One more look at what it takes to build a fat startup. Sunny Gupta discusses Apptio. The company raised a $7 million series A to get started, and then went to raise over $130 million thus far.

Sramana Mitra: Sunny, let’s start at the very beginning. Tell us a bit about yourself. Where were you born and raised? What kind of circumstances? Give us a backstory of the Apptio story.

Sunny Gupta: I was born in India in a town north of New Delhi. I went to school there and lived in New Delhi till I was 19. My father was in the government services. This is in the late ’80s and I didn’t feel, from a career perspective, that there were that many career options. >>>

Ownership Matters: How To Maximize Valuation

In an earlier Unicorn series article, I profiled Tableau Software, and how the company raised its Series A financing at a pre-money valuation of $20 million. In this piece, we look at RightNow. Series A valuation? $130 million. This piece is an excerpt from my book:Entrepreneur Journeys: Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction.

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