Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Manoj Leelanivas, CEO of Cyphort (Part 1)

In the crowded world of Cyber Security, where is the true innovation? Manoj throws light on an esoteric area of undiscovered threats and how they are handled by Cyphort.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Cyphort.

Manoj Leelanivas: I’m the President and CEO of Cyphort. I started off my professional career at Cisco about 20 years ago. I was part of the team that started Juniper Networks. I was with Juniper for a long time. I had different roles at Juniper. I ran all of engineering and all the product management groups. Then I created a software business for Johnson, our CEO, which grew to be $150 million business. I ran sales for a year and a half. One fine morning, I said, “It’s time for me to create a new startup.” I’ve done the large company and I just wanted to do something different. That’s my journey to Cyphort. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: RJ Metrics CEO Robert Moore (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you right now in terms channel, or other strategic pieces that enable you to grow? How do you acquire customer? Is it a direct channel? Is it an online channel?

Robert Moore: We have two main channels through which we acquire customers. One of them is inbound marketing and one of them is outbound sales. On the inbound marketing side, we made a really big effort from day one to be a thought leader in the space of data analysis, business intelligence, and e-commerce. We published very frequently everything from blog posts to white papers, to industry benchmark reports. We hold webinars every couple of weeks. We’re very prolific on the content side when it comes to providing people operating businesses with advise on how to use their data to make smarter decisions.

That content ecosystem is a really helpful source of leads for us because people become aware of us and then they say, “What’s this RJMetrics?” They click through and raise their hands to try the product out. We have a free trial as part of our on-boarding process. Because there’s a very low amount of risk, we’re able to get a lot of people in on the free trial on a monthly basis. As long as we convert a good amount of them, it works well. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: RJ Metrics CEO Robert Moore (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You said you’ve raised about $22 million. Let’s talk about other strategic moves during the past four years that you’ve been a venture-funded company.

Robert Moore: One thing that we did quite recently that I think was very strategic in nature was we decided to release a second product. For most SaaS companies, your brand is also the brand of your product. It’s all nice, clean, and simple. If you’re using Zendesk, you’re using Zendesk. There are some companies out there in the SaaS universe who end up releasing multiple products for various reasons. For us, we saw a trend happening in the market where we noticed that a lot of our customers had a desire for much more control over how their data was stored, where it was stored, and what tools  they use to analyze it in addition to RJMetrics. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: RJ Metrics CEO Robert Moore (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What were your metrics when you were putting this round together? What kind of monthly revenue run rate did you have at that time?

Robert Moore: At that time, we were less than a million in revenue. That would translate to something to the order of a hundred customers, or just below a hundred. We were profitable when we raised that money.

Sramana Mitra: Awesome.

Robert Moore: We had to file a business tax return in 2011. We raised in 2012. When we started raising money, that’s when we made the deliberate decision that a lot of SaaS companies do, which is we know that we can put $1 out and we get $2 back in. It just takes a year to get those $2 back. If we want to make $2 million, then we have to put out $1 million today. That would mean that you burn cash in the short term. We made a deliberate strategic decision to make this be a growth business rather than a traditional net present value business. It started dipping into being a company that burns cash. We grew really rapidly. That’s when we started to achieve some real scale. >>>

Building a High Growth SaaS Company from Los Angeles: Nick Hedges, CEO of Velocify (Part 7)

Nick Hedges: At the same time, the current CEO was facing unfortunate circumstances. Two weeks after he joined the company, his wife was diagnosed with cancer. He spent two years as the CEO of Velocity, or Leads360 as it was called then. All the time, he and I knew that he was not going to be the CEO forever. The only good thing was that I was lined up for succession very early in his tenure. That’s partly why I was promoted so quickly to a number of different roles and how I ended up becoming the CEO of Velocify.

Sramana Mitra: How has revenue been tracking in this period that we are talking about?

Nick Hedges: We grew at 40% to 60% from the time that I’ve been at Velocify. That’s year-on-year growth. Growth accelerated in 2012.

Sramana Mitra: What was the trigger that accelerated that growth? >>>

Building a High Growth SaaS Company from Los Angeles: Nick Hedges, CEO of Velocify (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How did eteatrade go?

Nick Hedges: It went well. We ended up transacting about $2 million a month. The net margins were pretty small. Ultimately, we sold it into one of Nick’s businesses that ran his tea and coffee estates. I didn’t want to be a part of a bigger entity, so I left. I did VC for a short period of time doing small investments in southeast of England for a company called Southeast Growth Fund. That was really a tremendous experience for me. I had the entrepreneurial experience and had some success at doing that. I also got to see a large number of very early stage companies.

We were investing £250,000 to £1 million in businesses that were trying to get off the ground. We were investing quickly in a lot of companies. I got to see a very big pipeline. That was super interesting to me. While I was working for that company, I also applied to business school. I got a place at Harvard Business School and got a scholarship. I decided that I was going to do that for a couple of years, and that’s how I came over to the US. >>>

Building a High Growth SaaS Company from Los Angeles: Nick Hedges, CEO of Velocify (Part 1)

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

This story illustrates a couple of interesting strategic moves that have resulted in growth acceleration for Velocify. These kinds of strategic moves are critical to the evolution of a business.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What’s the back story of Velocify?

Nick Hedges: I was born in England where I lived for 30 years. I would say that I was expected to be a banker when I grew up. My father was a successful banker and his father was also a banker. I really disappointed my parents by going into the advertising industry after college. I went to Manchester University and graduated Valedictorian from school. I decided that I wanted to do something more creative than banking. I went into advertising and worked for Ogilvy & Mather for a couple of years. I enjoyed that but found it a bit limiting. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Louis Tetu, CEO of Coveo (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Switching topics, what do you see on the horizon? What are the trends? What are the open problems around which people can build new startups in the cloud space?

Louis Tetu: I’ll declare from the get-go that I’m fairly passionate way above Coveo on the whole topic of leveraging data and not so much for BI and analytics, which is a major trend right now. I feel it is more important to leverage data in better ways to empower people. The fundamental premise is that people are capable of more on their own. We saw that as a major trend even over the past 20 years starting with ATMs. People can suddenly manage their transactions on their own. I’m starting with a very simple example. We evolved to portals and now e-commerce. Increasingly, we are in an era where digital literates can do a lot on their own and are not very well served, in general, by companies.

If you give digital literates richer information, they will do more on their own. I’m talking basically about intelligent software or software that can provide a better response. I think there are three things here in that journey. When a customer has a question, it might sound simplistic, but companies should provide >>>