A Kick-Ass Woman Entrepreneur: Cooper Harris, CEO of Klickly (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much money were you able to raise and what happened after?

Cooper Harris: Using that as a springboard, we parlayed that into a seed that was in the low millions. After raising a few millions, we were able to staff up. We were able to have a lot more resources. I should clarify that before this seed round, we had taken on a very small amount of about a couple hundred thousand dollars to make the tech more robust.

Sramana Mitra: Where was that from?

Cooper Harris: Angels. I can’t stress this enough for young companies. If you have a good idea, don’t disregard that early angel >>>

A Kick-Ass Woman Entrepreneur: Cooper Harris, CEO of Klickly (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the concept that you started this around?

Cooper Harris: The reason I had it came from a very mundane moment. I was on my phone. I saw an ad for a really cute pair of shoes. I wanted to buy the shoes. I clicked the ad and went to the page but it took forever. Finally when it loaded, it was not there. It was cumbersome. It annoyed me. I eventually didn’t buy the shoes.

I turned to my engineer friends and said, “Did you see what just happened? This is so absurdly inefficient and also unnecessary. Let’s have an impulse buy button when we want to purchase something in a digital environment.”

Sramana Mitra: When did you start this? >>>

A Kick-Ass Woman Entrepreneur: Cooper Harris, CEO of Klickly (Part 1)

This is a terrific entrepreneurial story of a woman entrepreneur with no technology background who is killing it with a technology startup.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? What’s your background?

Cooper Harris: I’m from the southeast of the East Coast. I was born in Atlanta and I grew up in North Carolina just because my mom is a professor at Duke and UNC. I also studied at Duke.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you do your education? >>>

From Zero to $3.7 Billion: Jyoti Bansal’s Textbook Case Study of Building AppDynamics (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I know you filed to go public because we used to cover you before you got acquired. What was the evolution of that journey?

Jyoti Bansal: Companies can go public anytime from $60 million to $300 million in revenue. We filed when we were about $160 million in revenue. We were growing rapidly at that time as well. Our model wasn’t completely recurring revenues. It was mostly subscription revenue, but we had a mix of license model there.

Sramana Mitra: You decided not to go public eventually. >>>

From Zero to $3.7 Billion: Jyoti Bansal’s Textbook Case Study of Building AppDynamics (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Let me double-click down on a couple of things before we go much beyond. First and foremost, talk a little bit about your business model. The price point that you described – $25,000 per customer – indicates that you need to sell this product by telesales. Is that correct or did your average deal size increase significantly?

Jyoti Bansal: Average deal size increased. From zero to $1 million, it was about $25,000. By the time we hit $10 million, it was about $60,000 to $70,000.

Sramana Mitra: Even that is a telesales price point though. >>>

From Zero to $3.7 Billion: Jyoti Bansal’s Textbook Case Study of Building AppDynamics (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How much runway did you have to raise money at this point?

Jyoti Bansal: I had runway. I was managing the expenses carefully. Even though we had funding, I kept the team to less than 10 people until we got to the first set of customers. Once the first set of customers came in, I started bringing out sales and marketing teams. We launched the company out of stealth. We raised our Series B about six months after coming out of stealth.

Sramana Mitra: We are now in mid-2010?

Jyoti Bansal: Yes. >>>

From Zero to $3.7 Billion: Jyoti Bansal’s Textbook Case Study of Building AppDynamics (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You do need to talk to people. The validation that you do in companies like that is the conversations that you bring to the investors. They use that as the validation.

Jyoti Bansal: Exactly. That’s what I learned. I should have a lot of conversations with customers. It’s also a challenge. How do you find these customers? If your target market is large enterprise, how do you find 20 to 25 customers that you can show as validation? I started using LinkedIn where I reached out to people and connected to people and said, “Can we have a 20-minute conversation about this idea I’m working on?”

With their permission, I would take notes. In my investor pitches, I would share those notes to show the way the pain is and the >>>

From Zero to $3.7 Billion: Jyoti Bansal’s Textbook Case Study of Building AppDynamics (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get this off the ground? Did you build something and then go out to raise money?

Jyoti Bansal: I was an engineer in my late 20s. I was convinced that there was a need there. First of all, the market was bigger than anyone thought. Then, the approach I was bringing in was the right kind of approach. I started coding it over weekends and nights.

Sramana Mitra: You kept your job at Computer Associates and you were doing the prototyping during nights and weekends?

Jyoti Bansal: Initially, for about three to four months. I started pitching my idea to VCs as well. Initially, a lot of VCs were >>>