Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Danny Yu, CEO of DainTree (Part 1)

Enterprise Internet of Things is getting a lot of hype these days. I sat down with Danny Yu, CEO of DainTree, a company that is actually selling an energy management solution for controlling the energy usage at commercial facilities. Very interesting window into a segment of the industry that is likely to create a couple of very large companies.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with a bit of context for our audience. Tell us about you and the company.

Danny Yu: DainTree is a provider of smart building control and energy management solutions. What we bring to our industry is the simplification of building energy management, which allows for tremendous energy and operational cost reduction and simplification of how enterprises run their business.

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Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland (Part 2)

Phil Copeland: I had started that business from home. My wife was working at that time and it was self-funded. Five or six years later, I think we had about 70 or 80 employees. We’ve become established as one of the significant distributors and service providers around client server computing in the Asia Pacific region. In 1996, we were acquired by a large US software company Open Environment Corporation, which had recently listed on NASDAQ. They were looking for a business partner and a base to establish their Asia Pacific operation as well as acquire some of the products that we built along the way. That was my first exit from a company. In fact, the irony of that story was that six months later, I stepped in as the acting CEO of Open Environment for a year during its sale to Borland. >>>

Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland (Part 1)

Phil bootstrapped Avoka using services around an Adobe product, and then developed core IP and a product of his own at Avoka. The methodology is tried and true, and worth learning from.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the beginning of your story. Tell us where you’re from, where you were born and raised, and in what kind of circumstances.

Phil Copeland: I was born in Sydney, Australia in 1958. I attended school in Australia and studied Architecture in the late 70s and graduated in the early 1980s. People of my generation had little computer education at school and even at universities. My first exposure to computing was when I was writing my thesis on passive solar design. >>>

Aiming to Disrupt Consumer Credit: Al Goldstein, CEO of AvantCredit (Part 5)

Al Goldstein: We just focused on the things that are most critical to the business. In our case, it was building out the regulatory infrastructure from day one, and building data reporting and analytics infrastructure. There was demand because there are a lot of customers looking for lending products. As we’ve grown our business, we continue to refine. We continue to make sure that we operate within our various constraints including capital constraints. As an example on the regulatory side alone, we have 20 full-time people who are focused on regulatory compliance. That’s just massive for a business that is less than two years old.

Sramana Mitra: Between starting the service to when you got your first institutional lending partner, what was the time window? >>>

Aiming to Disrupt Consumer Credit: Al Goldstein, CEO of AvantCredit (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you went to market, what about the institutional partner side? Did you go to market with a set of institutional partners pre-negotiated?

Al Goldstein: No, we didn’t. In these marketplaces, you have to match both sides. To get started, we lent only our own capital. We raised equity capital. We have raised over $100 million of equity capital today. We took the risk ourselves and lent our capital plus a combination of debt capital on top of that until we built up on our portfolio to show the performance of the loans over time – to show that our models were, in fact, very predictive. As we got more and more performance, the institutions became more and more interested.

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Aiming to Disrupt Consumer Credit: Al Goldstein, CEO of AvantCredit (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is your offering for any kind of credit or is this for a specific kind of credit?

Al Goldstein: We provide two products today in two markets where we operate in the US and the UK. Our first product is an installment loan product. This type of loan ranges from $1,000 to $20,000 for a period of one to four years. This is a fully amortizing monthly pay product. So customers will borrow, on average, $5,000 and pay it back in monthly equal installments to zero over the term of the loan. These loans have no origination fees or late payment penalties.

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Aiming to Disrupt Consumer Credit: Al Goldstein, CEO of AvantCredit (Part 2)

Al Goldstein: The real estate business was a lot more competitive and a lot more difficult. What we saw was a huge opportunity in providing credit alternatives to near-prime or mid-prime borrowers. Half of the credit spectrum are all customers making about $50,000 to $60,000 a year and with credit scores between 600 and 700. However, they are not provided with access to credit by companies that are taking advantage of technology and analytics at the forefront. Our vision for the company is that we want to build an online capital line. We started this business about two years ago and it has worked out great because my two co-founders were my former interns in my first company. One is from a technology background and one from a data and analytics background. I’ve spent four years or so in my first business and then went out to the Valley and participated in Y Combinator. We’ve had a great run so far. >>>

Apptio is Improving Offerings

According to Gartner, the worldwide IT operations management software revenue grew 4.8% over the year to $18 billion in 2012. The market was dominated by five key vendors, IBM, CA Technologies, BMC Software, Microsoft, and HP that accounted for 55% of the market share. But the smaller vendors are catching up. Overall the top five vendors reported a modest 0.6% growth over the year while all the other vendors accounted for a growth of 10% over the year.

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