Bootstrapping in Minnesota: Praful Saklani, CEO of Pramata (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to what timeframe?

Praful Saklani: That brings us to probably mid to late 2007. There’s a second piece that I’d like to add to this. As we were developing this, it wasn’t just about a technology product model that we built. We actually built a whole service and delivery model around it. One of the things that we identified in our discussions with potential customers was that their issue was only partially a technological problem. Yes, they didn’t have tools that allowed them to get at this data. A lot of it was around data integrity and data accuracy. Where is the data coming from? >>>

Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It has a gigantic budget.

Gaurav Rewari: Right. Stepping along the pillars, if you will, of IT service management to IT asset management, to IT project management, these are the building blocks of something called ERP for IT. They were imagining that into existence in the cloud. I felt that not only were they doing that replacement category for IT service management, but their ambition is also playing out on a larger scale with this ERP for IT. >>>

Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year does that bring us up to?

Gaurav Rewari: That brings us to 2012.

Sramana Mitra: That was pretty recently.

Gaurav Rewari: Yes, but that startup bug I alluded to earlier hadn’t quite left me. It started biting me quite hard again. Our respective product lines at Oracle were doing really well. They were either number one or number two in each category. I looked out and I really felt like the enterprise landscape was changing on an epic scale right in front of my eyes. Specifically, what I felt very strongly about was the rise of the cloud delivery model. It was creating significant upheaval in a lot of established IT buying categories. We saw it play out in CRM with the rise of Salesforce.com and HCM with the rise of Workday. I began to ask myself, “What impact is this going to have on analytics?” Analytics has always been a secondary market. The idea is that if you can stroll into a company like we did in the mid 90s at MicroStrategy, you would see a lot of on-premise software. >>>

Bootstrapping in Minnesota: Praful Saklani, CEO of Pramata (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Which brings us up to mid-2000?

Praful Saklani: That’s exactly right. In 2005, I decided it was time to move back to the US for a variety of reasons. I wanted to get back into enterprise software and started to think about the things that either I had experienced as a pain point or my customers had experienced that would be really interesting to create a company around. That’s when I started to zero in on my experience when I sold Yatra and had to deal with lots of paper work as well as the attorneys and accountants coming in and looking at files. I remember there was very little automation in that process during that time. I started to zero in on how well-understood all of that information is and started to network with other people who would have done some other things or who might be dealing with that problem on a regular basis. That was really the seed idea that eventually flowered into Pramata. >>>

Billion Dollar Unicorns: eClinicalWorks Bootstraps With A Paycheck

According to a 2014 Accenture report, the global market for electronic health records (EHR) is projected to grow to $22.3 billion in 2015. North America is expected to remain the biggest region in the industry, growing 7% annually to bring in $10.1 billion. Westborough, Massachusetts-based eClinicalWorks is a growing force in the industry and a proud member of the Billion Dollar Unicorn club member. What’s more, the company was bootstrapped with a paycheck.

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Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You can’t have everything. You have to choose. What year does that bring us up to?

Gaurav Rewari: In early 2000, I decided to do another startup in the consumer space. It was a company called FirstRain, named after the Indian monsoon season. I have memories of staring out at torrential rain and the relief it brought to arid lands. The idea was to try and harvest the web for information that may be useful for some vertical domains. It was a vertical search play. Of course, 2000 turned out to be a completely different time. This was the early part of 2000 with respect to technology markets. I started with some colleague from MicroStrategy and some professors from Princeton and Yale but very quickly realized that we needed to go back to the drawing board and reinvent ourselves, which we did, as an enterprise focus play.

Sramana Mitra: I’m aware of that. We had Penny. She related that story on the repositioning.
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Founding Elance, then Webaroo: Beerud Sheth’s Entrepreneurial Journey (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What apps are getting you in the door at the enterprises?

Beerud Sheth: I think sales usually is the biggest because these are decentralized teams. Real-time information has a huge impact on sales performance. If they are behind target, they can react to it in real-time.

Sramana Mitra; Who’s buying in the sales organizations?

Beerud Sheth: Usually, the Head of Sales sees the value immediately. Of course, the execution happens with Sales Ops. These are line managers where the problem is the most acute. The senior executives get aggregated data. They don’t care. >>>

Founding Elance, then Webaroo: Beerud Sheth’s Entrepreneurial Journey (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: These are large enterprise deals essentially.

Beerud Sheth: Yes and no. They are large enterprises but selling to them is quite easy because we designed the product to be very simple. The app is a freemium product available in the app store and in the cloud. You just download and can get started in less than 30 seconds. It’s as easy as any messaging app. It’s freemium, so there’s no contract. People can pilot it and when they’re ready to scale it up, it’s a very simple self-serve payment model. It’s a pay-as-you-go model for $2 per user per month. What I mean is there is this huge trend of consumerization of the enterprise. We built our software to be really simple. In many of these cases, it usually just takes two to three meetings. Many organizations are just comfortable running it themselves. >>>