Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Matt Oppenheimer, CEO of Remitly (Part 1)

International money transfer is on its way to becoming a contactless workflow. It’s still early in terms of adoption, but the handwriting is on the wall.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s have you introduce yourself as well as Remitly to our audience.

Matt Oppenheimer: I’m the Founder and CEO of Remitly.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Remitly.

Matt Oppenheimer: Remitly is a mobile phone alternative to the offline cash-based system of sending money internationally. We started about five years ago. We send over a billion in annual transactions which makes us the largest independent digital money transmitter in the US. We’re growing very rapidly. We grew about 400% year on year last year.

Sramana Mitra: The old player in the space is Western Union except they’re not mobile. Is that how you categorize the space? Can you give us a overview of the space? >>>

Bootstrapping, Fund Raising and Exit: Mads Jensen’s Journey with Sefaira (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting and strategic from decision making or navigating this venture?

Mads Jensen: Our partnerships were very important. We work in an ecosystem where there are some big design firms and technologies that people already use. You may know Autodesk, which is a big software company. That’s one of our partners and that was extremely important for us. SketchUp is another partner. It’s owned by Trimble who ultimately bought Sefaira. Those partnerships are really important and without them, we would not have been able to grow in the way we did.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of business generation, how much business does Autodesk generate for you? What is the structure of the Autodesk deal? Is it an OEM deal?

Mads Jensen: As technology and marketing partners, they don’t sell our product but our partners have helped us in many situations. They help co-market and >>>

Bootstrapping, Fund Raising and Exit: Mads Jensen’s Journey with Sefaira (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It was 2012 when you launched the product. How did you do that year? How many customers were you able to bring on in 2012 after the first year of the launch?

Mads Jensen: We grew at an accelerating clip from 2012 and until the exit this year. I couldn’t say exactly how many users we brought on in the first year. It was more work initially because it was a commercial offering and we were very keen to monetize. We didn’t have a freemium strategy. It was more of an enterprise strategy.

We went out to firms and we wanted them to pay us a subscription fee. The first 10 firms was incredibly hard. They liked what they saw but architects are not big spenders. We had to convince them of the merits of investing with us.

Sramana Mitra: How much were you charging? >>>

Bootstrapping, Fund Raising and Exit: Mads Jensen’s Journey with Sefaira (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the concept that you were working with while you were pursuing your one-year MBA at INSEAD in the 2008 timeframe?

Mads Jensen: Peter Krebs and I had a a lot of experience in software and technology and we both have worked in the construction industry. Peter is a Civil Engineer and my family had been in that business. We knew that there was a big opportunity within sustainability in the sense that buildings are responsible for more than a third of the carbon emissions.

They are a big part of the problem of climate change, but they’re also a big part of the opportunity. We can build much better buildings and that will really address that, but far too many buildings are not sustainable. We thought that it was a good opportunity. What if we could make buildings more sustainable. That was a couple of years after Facebook took off. Web applications were all the rage. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Ryan Golden, CEO of Moasis (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take maybe three customer use cases and talk us through how you have optimized their campaigns.

Ryan Golden: We work with a lot of QSRs. As opposed to traditional ways of just drawing the radius around their stores, we focus on taking a macro location in finding pockets or areas where lift is occurring. Based on time, location, and other data points, we’re able to make adjustments in real-time to then course-correct the campaign in-flight to increase performance. McDonalds, Burger King, or any QSR can say, “My customers are all over San Francisco. When is the right time to speak to these people and I need to talk to them now.” That makes it dynamic fundamentally.

Sramana Mitra: What is the answer to that question if I’m McDonald’s and my customer is all over San Francisco? What am I optimizing for? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Ryan Golden, CEO of Moasis (Part 1)

This discussion delves into location based mobile advertising optimization, an emerging arena that will likely grow substantially.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to Moasis and yourself.

Ryan Golden: I’m the co-founder and CEO of Moasis. We provide in-flight location optimization. We discover location opportunities for brand marketers and ad agencies at scale and what we do is we continuously optimize by adjusting the content and ads within location, based on results to increase effectiveness. We believe location is a critical layer in bringing context and relevancy to real time.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic. Let’s double-click down on customers. What customer segment are you after? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Everbridge CEO Jaime Ellertson (Part 4)

Jaime Ellertson: Let me now answer your question on growing areas of our business where we see opportunities. When we think of corporate with information exchange, they spend in the neighbourhood of $5 billion dollars a year on the physical buildings that all their employees are in. The reality is when someone leaves that building or comes in early and it’s dark, there’s no one escorting them to their car.

It could also be kids in college campus. Who protects them when they’re wandering in between the building and it’s dark outside? We’re spending all this money on the physical asset. Isn’t people the most important asset that most businesses have and aren’t they traveling more than ever? We see the idea that security is going to move from physical to the virtual world. Instantly by pressing a button on their mobile phone, either corporate security or family will know that I’m having a problem. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Mike Baukes and Alan Sharp-Paul, Co-CEOs of UpGuard (Part 1)

Just like your credit score, your security score is an important metric to track. Read on to see what’s happening in that realm.

Sramana Mitra: If one of you could give us some background about UpGuard as well as the two of you, that would be great to begin with.

Mike Baukes: We’re a company that basically focuses on making it easy to understand your digital posture and its digital resilience. I’m one of the Co-Founders, and I’m a Co-CEO alongside Alan Sharp-Paul.

Sramana Mitra: Are you both from the security space? What we see in the security companies is that the founders have been in the industry for a long time. >>>