Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 1)

I have never seen a company raise so much money from so many angels. It is far from standard practice in the industry, but Manmeet did it! Find out how…

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from and where were you raised? Give me the back story of your entrepreneurial journey.

Manmeet Singh: I’m from New Delhi, India. I did my education back in India. In about a year, I came to the US as a programmer for HCL. Since then, I’ve been in the IT field, working for large companies. In 1999, I made a move towards startups. I learned how >>>

Founding Elance, then Webaroo: Beerud Sheth’s Entrepreneurial Journey (Part 1)

Beerud Sheth founded Elance back in 1998. At the time, the concept was new and path breaking. Today, with freelancing becoming a gigantic part of the global workplace, the company is playing a massive role in matching businesses with service providers. You can also read our interview with Fabio Rosati on Elance’s evolution.

Today, Beerud is on his second company, Webaroo, which in turn, is on its second mobile messaging product.

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 circumstances?
>>>

Scaling a Cloud Telephony Company in India: Knowlarity CEO Ambarish Gupta (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What’s his background? What did he do after IIT?

Ambarish Gupta: Like most IIT guys, he went to Silicon Valley and worked for startups for eight to nine years. I got him back. He was also my colleague in McKinsey in the Pittsburgh office. He has a PhD in Highway Engineering from the University of Illinois. Then, he worked in McKinsey for four years. A lot of people in the product team working on this platform are people who have returned from the Valley. >>>

Achieving Product-Market Fit That Allows You to Build Billion Dollar Unicorns: Gaurav Dhillon, Founder of Informatica and SnapLogic (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Help me rationalize what’s happening right now in the market regarding late-stage valuation bubbles. We have two kinds of bubbles in the startup venture world. One is in the seed capital. In 2013, 70,000 companies were angel-financed. That’s too much actually. It’s great that they got angel-funded, but then if you look at the next level, it’s 1,000 venture funding or 70,000 paired down to 1,000. Technically, those companies probably need to be bootstrapped and they’re not going to be scalable venture-scale companies, which should not have been funded in the first place. A lot of people are going to take tax right off. That’s one part of the bubble.

I actually don’t think the early-stage venture capital Series A and Series B is in that much of a bubble. It’s more in the Series C, Series D, and in some cases, Series E, that is completely out of control valuation, right? Part of the issue that we’re going to have to resolve somehow is that the public market is not in a bubble. What is your analysis of this market? You recently raised money. What was your experience in navigating this market?
>>>

Achieving Product-Market Fit That Allows You to Build Billion Dollar Unicorns: Gaurav Dhillon, Founder of Informatica and SnapLogic (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: This time around, are there any surprises in the product market fit process? You repeated the same process, I imagine.

Gaurav Dhillon: The same thing but with a twist. With Informatica, the timing was spot on. The change was happening in a big way. Year 2000 was coming. From the time we raised venture capital in 1995 to the time we got to $50 to $60 million in revenue in 1999, our timing was spot on. With SnapLogic, our timing was a little bit early. We had built out this technology. We had SnapLogic running on AWS in 2008. That’s like seven years ago. Enterprises weren’t there yet.

If you look at SaaS at that time, SaaS was a mid-market phenomenon. Among people using SaaS today, the majority of revenues and by far, the vast majority of profits for SaaS companies are coming from the enterprise. In fact, Workday is an enterprise-only SaaS company. They don’t even sell to mid-market. Their average deal size is probably $2 million. All these things were just coming out at that time. I think we were slightly early. Of course, we had the technology. >>>

Achieving Product-Market Fit That Allows You to Build Billion Dollar Unicorns: Gaurav Dhillon, Founder of Informatica and SnapLogic (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: 156 customer calls that you made gave you real conversations about real customer problems. Even though you didn’t sell what you went out to sell, this was a great opportunity to immerse yourself in customers and learn what they were really looking for.

Gaurav Dhillon: This is AB testing to the power of a million.

Sramana Mitra: By the way, this is a process that we use for all our customer validation work. Many of our entrepreneurs who have been part of the Entrepreneur Journeys case study series have shared this process of immersion.

Gaurav Dhillon: In the complex software, hardware, and networking business, this is a tried and tested method. I was a graduate student in Computer Science. If I’d done an MBA, I would have learned this. It’s a great lesson because that is what we then refined and built. We said, “Everybody’s going to need to move the data. Everybody’s going to need to connect the mainframe to the client server. Then they’re going to want to >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Damon Ragusa, CEO of ThinkVine (Part 3)

Damon Ragusa: What we do is consolidate data from a lot of different sources. There are three V’s of Big Data—Volume, Velocity, and Variety. Variety is my favorite V. I think you get more value by integrating a larger variety of data to explain the thing you’re trying to understand than just more of the same. Fortunately in this world, we get a lot of both. We get a wide variety of data and we use some nifty algorithms that we’re able to connect all these data—demographic, behavioral, sales, digital click stream—to a modeling framework that allows us to understand and start to simulate how individual people carry out their interactions with the brand and media, and how they buy within a category.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Damon Ragusa, CEO of ThinkVine (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of your business composition, are you a product business or a services business?

Damon Ragusa: That’s a great question and we’re both. When we started the company, we talked about being a Software-as-a-Service platform. We still do have a SaaS platform that delivers insights and allows our customers to essentially develop a more agile marketing process. We also provide services because without that, it’s difficult for a lot of these organizations to fully integrate the insights that come out of systems like ours and understand best practices and how to move forward. We have customers who view us as an extension of their marketing planning organization. There are other customers who work very hands-on with our software and have very little interaction with us. We provide both as part of our product and service, with a majority of our revenues from the SaaS platform. >>>