Scaling to $10M ARR with a Virtual Company: Fred Plais, CEO of Platform.sh (Part 1)

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

Fred has built a wonderful company with a virtual architecture. Read on to see how.

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

Fred Plais: I was born in the western part of France. I’ve worked at three different companies. I’ve got three kids and a wife, and I now live in San Francisco.

Sramana Mitra: What is your education? What did you study? >>>

Turning Philanthropy into a Double Bottomline Business: Ram Palaniappan, CEO of Earnin (Part 3)

Ram Palaniappan: Then I asked them to fill out a web form if they needed money. Once I had the web form up, people who I didn’t know tried to use it. I got access to their employer’s time attendance system, so I was able to do it for people who I didn’t know. That’s when I realized that what I was doing was very similar to a payroll system.

I looked at how much someone worked, converted it into a dollar amount, then I pushed it out to their bank account. I was doing sort of an API call for each individual for the amount that they needed. All their bills were being paid on time. There were no more overdraft fees or payday loans. Life was much simpler. That’s how the company started. >>>

Turning Philanthropy into a Double Bottomline Business: Ram Palaniappan, CEO of Earnin (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How big did the company become revenue-wise?

Ram Palaniappan: The company ended up with a private equity firm getting a stake in it. Subsequently, the company was acquired by a public company called Green Dot.

Sramana Mitra: Was the parent company financing it when you were brought in?

Ram Palaniappan: It was financed by two individuals. >>>

Turning Philanthropy into a Double Bottomline Business: Ram Palaniappan, CEO of Earnin (Part 1)

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

When people have to live paycheck to paycheck, life can easily get unbearable. Earnin offers loans against paychecks as collateral to alleviate this incessant pressure to low income families at affordable rates.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of an early journey have you had?

Ram Palaniappan: I was born in Cleveland, Ohio and moved back to India when I was five. I did most of my schooling there. I did my undergraduate studies there. Then I came to the US to do my MBA at Purdue. That was in 1998. I was there for two years. I ended up >>>

Scaling to Over $10 Million From Delaware: Ye Zhang, CEO of Katabat (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about the customer service value proposition. What is it that you do specifically that delivers on the customer service value proposition?

Ye Zhang: We are still focused on financial institutions. Financial institutions have a lot of legacy systems behind their firewall. There will be a lot of silo’d communication components. One for email, one for their website, and one for their app. All of those things are actually added.

Also we found that they don’t talk to each other very well. The value proposition of our customer service platform is that if you put your customer into our platform, all the channels will be managed by this same platform. That will improve your efficiency. More importantly, that will >>>

Scaling to Over $10 Million From Delaware: Ye Zhang, CEO of Katabat (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Go back to when you started with the collections value proposition with this digital marketing technology and tell me how long you did the business focused on collections agencies. How far did you get by selling to that class of customers? How much revenue were you able to build up?

Ye Zhang: We had been focusing on collections agency for only the first two years from 2004 to 2006. We actually collected on behalf of our customers. That business model is totally different. We were making a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year and we felt that it’s very heavy. Starting 2006, we pivoted into a software company. We sell technology instead of selling the service of collection. Starting from 2006 to 2013, we >>>

Scaling to Over $10 Million From Delaware: Ye Zhang, CEO of Katabat (Part 2)

Ye Zhang: Very quickly, we found that it’s a very tedious job to set up a collection agency because of a lot of compliance rules. Compliance rules are very different in different states and cities. We were required to acquire licenses at individual state level. Doing that would take a lot of manpower. It was really heavy on the operation side. We pivoted.

My strength was on the technology side. We felt that we should sell software instead of running an agency. At that time, SaaS just started. Salesforce is making a big name in the cloud computing industry. We figured that SaaS domain is a very hopeful domain. If we can build a really usable product and platform and license that to bankers using the subscription model, that would be the best way to monetize that product. We >>>

Scaling to Over $10 Million From Delaware: Ye Zhang, CEO of Katabat (Part 1)

The state of Delaware has been working with 1Mby1M to stimulate entrepreneurship. Here is a wonderful success story from the region.

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?

Ye Zhang: I was born in China. I came to the United States in 1998 to pursue my Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence.

Sramana Mitra: Where was that? >>>