Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Your thesis on it was that it had to be manually kept up to speed?

Rakesh Gupta: No, not manually. It has to be efficiently collected but certainly not in the fashion of crowdsourcing. It’s about collecting it in the right way and verifying it independently.

Sramana Mitra: So you verify it other than manually?

Rakesh Gupta: We can do it in multiple different ways. Every information coming in electronically is not equally accurate. If you get information from a highly reliable source that is collecting information only for that purpose, that is highly reliable. If somebody has a directory of doctors and that’s all they do for a living, that’s high-quality information. That’s very different from uploading business cards. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: eMazzanti CEO Carl Mazzanti (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of your current business, what percentage of that is selling your own product versus selling other people’s products?

Carl Mazzanti: 60% to 70% is our own.

Sramana Mitra: But Infrastructure-as-a-Service, right?

Carl Mazzanti: Let me answer your first question. Your first question is what percentage of it is selling your own service that’s unique to yourself. Somewhere between 60% and 70% is our own intellectual property. The remaining 40% is when someone comes up to us and says, “I don’t want your black box, but I know you’re the best. Can you do this for us?” >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: eMazzanti CEO Carl Mazzanti (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that you were building more like a toolkit as opposed to a full blown architected product? You have a toolkit that you apply wherever similar problems crop up again. Does that describe the scenario better?

Carl Mazzanti: If you look at where we are 15 years from now, the primary verticals have changed. What problems we’re solving for customers today is different than it was 10 years ago but the email filtering company will most certainly run for a long time. But that is not the current growth story of the organization. That was the growth story for maybe our eighth year in business. In the technology space, your cheese moves around.

Sramana Mitra: I understand that at year five, you came up with this email filtering product. That was one of the major moves that you made in a product direction. It sounds like you’ve made more shifts in your strategy naturally because you’ve been in business for 15 years. At the five year point when you brought the email filtering product into market, what did that do to your business in terms of scaling? Did it double the business? >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: eMazzanti CEO Carl Mazzanti (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Then what’s the next milestone after moving to that Microsoft strategy or becoming a more general plumbing support beyond security?

Carl Mazzanti: Shared services. Our first level shared services was email filtering. Instead of selling someone a hardware appliance, we moved that to what everyone now calls the cloud. Back then, it was called the shared service.

Sramana Mitra: Whose product were you supporting in that space?

Carl Mazzanti: It’s our own. We filter million plus messages a day.

Sramana Mitra: You actually went into starting your own product at this point?

Carl Mazzanti: We did.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about that. That’s a strategy that we see a lot of services companies use to move to products once they get into a market and develop a customer base. We call it Bootstrapping Using Services. >>>

Raising $20 Million from Angel Investors: Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele Contorer (Part 5)

Lori Steele Contorer: We began to focus on United States for serving overseas and military voters. We did that because the numbers were staggering. 70% of the time that people tried to vote from abroad, their votes weren’t counted. That’s not because governments don’t count the vote unless they have to. That’s a misperception. Governments always have to account all the ballots that come in as long as they come in on time. Because of the challenges of voting from abroad with the mail, that wasn’t happening.

We helped to get a law passed in 2009 that required every State in the US to offer digital ballots to their overseas voters. They could still choose to vote by mail if they wanted to but we were going to give them the ability to offer a secure digital ballot. That’s where the big change in the market began. I’m beginning to see that sort of change not just in United States but internationally.

Sramana Mitra: We have no idea what the size is of your company or how you’ve grown through the years. I need something to anchor the story in. >>>

Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll tell you one thing that I disagree with in what you said in this particular comment. I think you actually grew perfectly reasonably from a SaaS business model point of view after you made the switch in about 2010. If you look at your company from 2010 to 2014, my assumption is you have a reasonable growth rate. I don’t think it’s a sub-par growth rate but until 2010, you were not operating on a SaaS model.

Eyal Magen: That’s also true.

Sramana Mitra: We’re doing story after story of SaaS companies that start as SaaS companies that are scaling phenomenally fast. If you look at Marketo, for instance, it’s a rapidly growing company. These companies started as SaaS. They had no illusions of being anything else. They wanted to be SaaS. >>>

Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: By the time you went to VCs, you had proof of concept, plenty of customer feedback, and you were a proven quantity as far as the VCs are concerned. I imagine raising money was not very difficult.

Ron Bianchini: Right. I loved our Series A round. We basically went back to Menlo and Norwest. They did the Series A round for Avere. They’re just incredible partners. We have John Jarve at Menlo and Matt Howard at Norwest.

Sramana Mitra: That was in 2009?

Ron Bianchini: Yes, that was in 2009.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to ship the first product? >>>

Raising $20 Million from Angel Investors: Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele Contorer (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you were executing this project, what was the business model for the company?

Lori Steele Contorer: The business model at that time was to sell election software and services, probably on a per election fee as opposed to a SaaS model. We would get hired to do an election and we would deliver the software and the services around that. It was usually done either remotely by PC or at a polling station.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of average deal size were these projects? The government of Australia was your client. What scale of a client was that?

Lori Steele Contorer: It was definitely mid-six figures. They were pilot projects for very specific voters. It wasn’t a large election for all voters and it wasn’t small private sector elections. It became clear to us though after that, that a SaaS model made a whole lot more of sense. >>>