Multiple Pivots, Taking on Giants, to Over $100 Million in Revenue: Matthew Calkins, CEO of Appian (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The competitors who went away, were you winning their customers?

Matthew Calkins: We were winning the deals that they attempted to compete in.

Sramana Mitra: But people were not switching necessarily.

Matthew Calkins: By and large, whoever has done that installation doesn’t want to do it again. They’re going to hang on to whatever they’ve got until it dies on its feet. We weren’t able to go back to lost deals and win them the second time around, at least not in the near term. We were stronger proportionally in the new deals. They had this turmoil going on.

Sramana Mitra: We are talking 2012? >>>

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 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 Cloud Computing: Kurt Heikkinen, CEO of Montage Talent (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What levels are we talking? Are we seeing this more in technical recruitment or are we seeing this more on junior recruitment? Where is your product and is your process being applied more readily?

Kurt Heikkinen: It has evolved nicely over the last several years to be able to support the enterprise of hiring. The way we’re able to achieve that is through the configurability of our applications. Apart from on-demand video, we also offer up on-demand voice, live video, and live voice.

What we know is that the recruiting challenges are very different on a position-by-position basis. How you might want to recruit an executive or an engineer are very different from recruiting for a high-volume hourly position where maybe you’re staffing a call centre or a retail store. That’s where our solutions allow the client to apply the specific application and workflow to the specific use case. >>>

Leveraging Amazon To Build a Cloud Storage Business: Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Was there any segmentation of what kinds of customers were finding your product attractive?

Nelson Nahum: First of all, before the customer, I would like to tackle the question of the business model. We created a great technology. We found out that Amazon really liked what we do because it’s enterprise storage and it brings additional functionality to the Amazon cloud. Amazon doesn’t really OEM, but they offered us a cloud that is connected to them. Any customer of Amazon can be a customer of ours.

We said, “This could be very good. We can put in a small cloud and get the first customer.” This is how we got the first customer. We promoted the storage inside Amazon. There weren’t really a lot of options to use storage there as opposed to storage on-premise where anybody can buy from any storage company. The market is much more crowded today and it’s much harder to differentiate. Back then, the only options were either Amazon storage or us. Then people started finding us.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like your business model was a regular subscription SaaS business model. >>>

Leveraging Amazon To Build a Cloud Storage Business: Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage (Part 1)

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

Nelson has built an interesting enterprise storage company and one of his key strategic moves was an unusual deal with Amazon.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Nelson Nahum: I was born in Uruguay. I immigrated to Israel to study in college. Back in the 80s, Uruguay was governed by junta. It was not very nice to stay there. Me and my brother moved to Israel with little money to study engineering. I got accepted into the university. The first thing that I liked in Israel was the freedom that everybody had. It was totally new for me because I grew up in a dictatorship kind of environment.

Sramana Mitra: What did you study?

Nelson Nahum: Engineering. First of all, I studied Hebrew. After a few months, I got accepted into an engineering school in Technion University. >>>