Building a Mid-Market Security SaaS Company from Canada: J. Paul Haynes, CEO of eSentire (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Where did you raise money? You said you worked with some investors that you had prior relationships with and who wanted to get in early. Are these Canadian investors?

J. Paul Haynes: The first investor was Venture Link, which was Toronto-based. They came in fairly early. They have another affiliate firm. The government put a program in place that encourages venture investment. We were able to take advantage of an interest-free loan that was non-dilutive. There’s a window of eligibility that we just happened to take advantage of. The first round was in June of 2011.

Sramana Mitra: You said something which is a bit unusual. I want to explain that to the people who are reading >>>

Building a Mid-Market Security SaaS Company from Canada: J. Paul Haynes, CEO of eSentire (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: For the Series A investors, what did you tell them you were going to do? What problem were you going to solve?

J. Paul Haynes: I described to them the problem of solving cyber security in the mid-market. Everybody in the industry at that time appeared to be focused on the enterprise. We just have to sell to 50 of the Fortune 500 and the company is exit-ready is the standard business plan I was later told. The thing that drew them our way is we said, “That’s not who we’re selling to. Instead of the Fortune 500, we’re going after the 10,000 mid-sized enterprises in America and other parts of the world that have the same >>>

Building a Mid-Market Security SaaS Company from Canada: J. Paul Haynes, CEO of eSentire (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Before all this, it sounds like you started doing companies in ’76. I don’t think we have enough time to cover that long a story. It sounds like you have a background in enterprise security software. Could you give us a little bit of an idea about what you did before?

J. Paul Haynes: I did a Bachelors in Engineering and a Master’s in SCADA. During that, I started my first business. Upon finishing my Master’s, I already had a full customer roster working in the utility energy market. I basically went right into a job that I created for myself. I haven’t looked back. I think I graduated in 1991 from the Master’s. >>>

Building a Mid-Market Security SaaS Company from Canada: J. Paul Haynes, CEO of eSentire (Part 1)

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

There are opportunities of building cloud businesses focused on mid-market customers, and many entrepreneurs are leveraging those to build compelling businesses. eSentire’s strategy is one worth looking at closely.

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

J. Paul Haynes: I was born in Toronto. I grew up in a suburb of Toronto called Oakville. I grew up in a family of people studying >>>

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Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Utah: Ben Dilts, Founder and CTO of Lucid Software (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What did he figure out in terms of how you acquire customers? What is the business model? What is the pricing model for your product?

Ben Dilts: One piece of real concrete skill that Dave brought to the table was that he had a history in SEO. He had a good handle on how it worked and how to win. He did a tremendous job on making our website attractive to search engines and the self-serve funnel to flow well. That was a great decision early on because we didn’t have the manpower or the money to hire the manpower to hit the pavement and find customers for this.

We really needed people to come in and pay us. We needed a lot of those. We focused hard on the fundamentals of a self-serve business. The conversion rate >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from Utah: Ben Dilts, Founder and CTO of Lucid Software (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Where was Karl based?

Ben Dilts: He’s based here in Utah. As I mentioned, he moved here with his family. He was living here. He had left Google at that time and was looking around and seeing what he wanted to get involved with locally. He had spent most of his time at Mountain View.

Sramana Mitra: He had relationships with Google and the Silicon Valley ecosystem. He had worked before joining Google doing startups as a lawyer working on startup rounds and M&A. That was a great bootstrap to get us started there.

Ben Dilts: Yes

Sramana Mitra: When does this all come together timeline-wise? >>>