Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Datablink CEO Alexandre Cagnoni (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: From a revenue point of view, where are you? What kind of revenue and growth rate are you trying to raise money on?

Alexandre Cagnoni: Our revenue in 2016 was $7.5 million. We’re seeing a growth of approximately 30% year per year. I think if we get investment, we can accelerate this over 60% and reach some markets that today we’re not reaching. For example, we’re not doing anything in Europe. We have some conversations with potential partners but we don’t have activities in Europe. We don’t have too many activities now in the US. We believe that once we have everything set up here in the US, we’re going to be able to raise funding and then go to the other markets and even invest more in the US, >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Datablink CEO Alexandre Cagnoni (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is that the reason why you’re in the US? If you’re selling in Brazil and Asia, being in the US doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Alexandre Cagnoni: There are a few reasons we came to the US. First of all, Brazil is quite complicated in terms of taxes and how they handle international businesses. We believe that the US is a better place to concentrate international sales. Another reason is we are planning, in the near future, to get an investment to accelerate the growth. As I told you, we’re a bootstrapped company. The biggest deals are still in Brazil. Those deals are providing the investment we need for Asia and the US. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Datablink CEO Alexandre Cagnoni (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Lastly, what about the e-commerce sector where you said you just started offering services?

Alexandre Cagnoni: It happens to everybody all the time. I was recently on a trip to Indonesia. My card was refused when checking into the hotel and it was locked. It was identified by the system as a potential fraud. It was me using it. At the same time, I went to Best Buy. After 15 minutes, I was out of the store. I received a call from the credit card company saying, “We’re calling just to make sure that you’re the one doing the transaction.” I confirmed but if it was somebody else, the products would have been stolen already. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Datablink CEO Alexandre Cagnoni (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Are your customers large enterprises or mid market? Where is the sweet spot of your audience?

Alexandre Cagnoni: I would say that it would be medium and large enterprises. In the financial sector, we have both medium and large banks that have millions of devices. We have customers with 10 to 20 users using our solution, and we also have customers with millions of tokens deployed.

Sramana Mitra: I would like to do three different sector-based discussions next. Let’s talk about banking. What is the competitive landscape around fraud prevention and authentication solutions in the banking industry that you play in and how do you compete? >>>

Building a FinTech Company in Brazil: Sergio Furio, CEO of BankFacil (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You were finding people online who were looking for loans and connecting them to financial institutions.

Sergio Furio: At that point, it was even broader. We were looking for people looking for financial services in general. We were offering insurance, credit cards, and credit. We were capturing some basic information and doing some pre-qualification, and then sending those customers to financial institutions. The beauty of it is it was relatively inexpensive. It was about creating good content and having a good user interface. From an investment perspective, I didn’t need a ton of money.

The bad news happened a year after that. I realized that the model didn’t make sense. The reason was that the unit economics of lead generation in Latin America >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris McNabb, CEO of Dell Boomi (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the integration space, what do you think are open problems that new entrepreneurs should be looking at solving?

Chris McNabb: The one thing to recognize is integration shouldn’t be an afterthought for all of the reasons I talked earlier about why integration is becoming strategic to an enterprise. Let’s say they’re trying to create a SaaS. Anytime you create SaaS, integration is going to be a part of that. As an entrepreneur, you can decide, “Let me connect my system to the other system.” You have to appreciate the scale that your business is going to get to. >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Utah: Ben Dilts, Founder and CTO of Lucid Software (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What did he figure out in terms of how you acquire customers? What is the business model? What is the pricing model for your product?

Ben Dilts: One piece of real concrete skill that Dave brought to the table was that he had a history in SEO. He had a good handle on how it worked and how to win. He did a tremendous job on making our website attractive to search engines and the self-serve funnel to flow well. That was a great decision early on because we didn’t have the manpower or the money to hire the manpower to hit the pavement and find customers for this.

We really needed people to come in and pay us. We needed a lot of those. We focused hard on the fundamentals of a self-serve business. The conversion rate >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris McNabb, CEO of Dell Boomi (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk a bit about the competitive landscape? You said you’re the market leader. Whom do you see in deals?

Chris McNabb: The competitive landscape is very broad today. There are people who started in the integration PaaS about the same time that we did. You’ll see those kinds of competitors out there. All of the major software firms like Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft have offerings that compete in this market segment. The third general category is the startups or the niche players. They will focus on integration in a partner channel. They’ll focus on integration with EDI. They’ll focus on very specific kinds of integration styles or technologies while we’re much more of a horizontal play and a broad integration scenario play.

>>>