Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry (Part 1)

Chrome River is successfully taking on Concur (now SAP) in the expense reporting SaaS space. Find out how.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Dave Terry: I was born in Texas. I went to school at the University of Texas. I have a degree in Computer Science and Math. I came out of college spinning the propeller on my head. I was a program developer and moved to software programming field.

Sramana Mitra: What year was that?

Dave Terry: This was 1987. I began developing software. My first job was in programming. Fortunately, I fell into a job where I was developing software for large ERP systems for law firms. There was this company out of Dallas that was doing that. I was a software developer developing back-end, time billing, financial management, and AP automation for large law firms around the globe. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: CipherCloud CEO Pravin Kothari (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me actually double-click down. Our audience is very sophisticated. We’ve covered Palo Alto Networks for a long time and very intensely. We’ve covered FireEye for a long time. Let’s try to put it all in some sort of an ecosystem map. In your worldview, where does FireEye sit? Where does Palo Alto sit vis-a-vis CipherCloud?

Pravin Kothari: Definitely. I was just coming down to that. There is a need for security in endpoint like mobile devices, desktops, and servers. There is a need for security in the network. There is a need for security in the enterprise like Symantec. There is also a need for security in the cloud. The whole IT infrastructure is shifting towards cloud. Right now, I would say the tipping point is going to happen in a couple of years where more applications are going to be deployed in cloud than on premise. There is an increasing need for building security for the cloud. This is an area that CipherCloud focuses on – cloud security. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: CipherCloud CEO Pravin Kothari (Part 1)

Massive cloud adoption has added tremendous velocity to the speed at which business is done these days. However, it has also opened up security gaps. Listen to serial entrepreneur Pravin Kothari’s perspective on the subject.

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

Pravin Kothari: I’m the founder and CEO of CipherCloud. CipherCloud is a cloud security company. It’s focused on helping enterprise customers adopt cloud in a secure way. We allow our customers to get more visibility and more control over their cloud adoption.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take it from an ecosystem point of view. Could you map the ecosystem for us with a slightly high level perspective so that we can figure out where you’re positioning yourselves in that general landscape? >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Utah: Hirevue CEO Mark Newman (Part 4)

Mark Newman: In 2009 to 2010, it was all about market validation around getting our first big customers in terms of big enterprise brands. These were brands like Red Bull, Hilton Worldwide. Second part was getting validation and integration with the big partners. We got partnerships with Taleo and Kenexa. Third was getting outside market validation. We won our first HR Product of the Year award at the HR Tech Show, which is a really big award for our industry. It helped build some credibility there. Things started taking off.

Sramana Mitra: How did the revenue ramp from 2009 onwards?

Mark Newman: For 2015, we’ll be $30 million plus.

Sramana Mitra: What other capital infusion have you done besides the $1 million round in 2009? >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Utah: HireVue CEO Mark Newman (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: People were resonating with your value proposition.

Mark Newman: The product-market fit that we came across wasn’t the value proposition or the value creation that we delivered to our customers. It was the change management. Were people ready to change how they hired? It’s been done the same way since the invention of business. Then saying, “Now, do asynchronously. Trust that the system can ask the questions.” For HireVue, the journey has never been about the initial value proposition. That’s always made inherent sense to people. It’s been about the change management of refocusing how people build and coach their teams. When we do that, we see great results. Just like trying to help people quit smoking, the value is there and people know it. It’s the change and the drive that is the hard part.

Sramana Mitra: Anything that requires human behavior change is a very tough road. It’s an uphill task to make people change behavior. From 2004 to 2009, you invested $100,000. What was the ramp? >>>

Bootstrapping to $100 Million: Edifecs CEO Sunny Singh (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You were doing what kind of revenue level now?

Sunny Singh: In 2008, we were about $8 million to $10 million.

Sramana Mitra: In 2006, you’re back in a healthy state. What’s the next major development?

Sunny Singh: In 2001, when all this was going on, we came across this mandate from the government called HIPAA where all healthcare transactions had to comply with HIPAA standards. We entered healthcare but we didn’t have any idea about it or how it works. We just focused on taking on one customer at a time and making them successful. Before you know it, after five to seven years of good traction, healthcare companies started loving us. We had new approaches to solving problems. We were very customer-centric and our products were really good. From 2006 onwards, from being an EDI tools company we went on to become a products company because we started doing production transactions. We pivoted again to healthcare by supporting HIPAA. Then, we pivoted again by selling more of providing services starting 2007 to 2008. We started building out that competency. >>>

Bootstrapping to $100 Million: Edifecs CEO Sunny Singh (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: While it wasn’t a small company, it wasn’t one of the major companies – SAP or Oracle.

Sunny Singh: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: What were the contract sizes of the projects you were doing?

Sunny Singh: Under $2,000. They were all between $500 and $2,000. It depends how many seats they buy. If you bought more seats, you pay more.

Sramana Mitra: Early on, how did the revenue track? What was the revenue ramp like?

Sunny Singh: Around 1998 to 1999, we were a sub-$2 million company. We were doing a couple of projects. We were doing one contract where we were helping develop format for processes. >>>

Building a Marketing Software Company from Utah: Convirza CEO Jason Wells (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: They should and they do, but from a software design point of view, you have to keep in mind that they’re two different departments. You can’t assume that the user and user interface are going to be exactly the same.

Jason Wells: We learned that over the next couple of years as we went to sell to a Marketing Director who was really sharp. They wanted a campaign management because they knew that when they were sending people from their Google AdWords campaign, somebody would click and then they’d pick up the phone and call. That data looks like a bounce to them because they went to an offline world. They weren’t getting the data attribution for the phone calls. They wanted to run campaigns but the sales group wanted to know what the conversion rate was. They wanted to know if there were any missed opportunities.

It’s the same call but they wanted to look at it differently. That starts bringing us up to over the next couple of years from 2012 to the launch of Convirza. We did a couple of things. One is we introduced speech recognition and turned it into a conversation analytics platform. We built that to listen to every single call. >>>