Bootstrapping with Services: 2600Hz CEO Patrick Sullivan (Part 1)

Here’s yet another great case study of a successful bootstrapping whereby the entrepreneurs developed a solid product business eventually.

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

Patrick Sullivan: I was born in California. I eventually went to school at Santa Barbara and got a degree in Computer Science. I graduated in 1999. I moved back to Tahoe to be a ski bum for a year to get that out of my system. Then I moved to San Francisco right before the dot-com crash happened. It was a pretty awful thing from a career standpoint.

Sramana Mitra: What brought you to San Francisco? >>>

Navigating Through Multiple Pivots: Convercent CEO Patrick Quinlan (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You also need the direct to get the reference customers before you can get the channel to accept to sell you.

Patrick Quinlan: I don’t agree with that one. None of the customers were turning on. The customers were paying us. This was late 2009. Nobody had to file till 2010. What I did was I looked at the landscape and looked who is in this filing business. I quickly saw that RR Donnelley is the company that owns the vast majority of the filing business. What the mandate said is people who used to file in print now had to be electronic and in an interactive format. >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ephesoft Founder Ike Kavas (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Wonderful capital-efficient entrepreneurship. Where do you want to go from here?

Ike Kavas: We’re in the final stages of Series A. I’d like Ephesoft to remain a technology company and keep innovating. In 2013, we came up with a web service API. It brought new ways of thinking around what we do for our customers. In 2015, we came up with mobile capture where you can actually do your work on the phone offline.

Last year in November, we announced our new edition. It’s called Ephesoft Insights. We have the domain expertise on how to find >>>

Navigating Through Multiple Pivots: Convercent CEO Patrick Quinlan (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was it about your background that gave you any affinity towards that industry?

Patrick Quinlan: I wish I had a great answer to that, but I don’t. I love to eat out with my wife. We have a very funny way of going out to dinner. We get in a car. We pull out of the driveway. If we go left on the street called Cofax, there’s a bunch of immigrant non-US food joints. If you go right, you go to the cool bistros, farm-raised stuff, two blocks down that street. Once we decide right or left, we just go somewhere.

Even when we’re in different cities, we just walk in places. Where I’ve ended up in my companies is very much that same thing. >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ephesoft Founder Ike Kavas (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2012?

Ike Kavas: We got a few more sales people. We continue to expand in every location in America. If I remember correctly, our revenues went up to $550,000 that year. From there, we went to $1.1 million. The next year, it was $2.4 million.

Sramana Mitra: So $2.4 million in 2014?

Ike Kavas: Yes. >>>

Navigating Through Multiple Pivots: Convercent CEO Patrick Quinlan (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The truth is, you can learn income statement. Learning leadership is a much harder thing. Leadership is something that is either you have it naturally or don’t. It’s not so simple.

Patrick Quinlan: I would agree. We certainly see people who are uncomfortable leaders who have done good. At the end of the day, you can learn it. You either have that ownership or you don’t. You can get better at it.

Sramana Mitra: You can get better at it with experience. I think people are either natural leaders or not natural leaders. I don’t know. That’s just my bias. When this company was sold, what year was this happening? >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ephesoft Founder Ike Kavas (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How much money did you get from your friends and family to start this company?

Ike Kavas: Less than $200,000.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find these four people in India?

Ike Kavas: I did a lot of research on companies that can develop software. I interviewed companies from Ukraine, Russia, and India. This company passed my test. >>>

Navigating Through Multiple Pivots: Convercent CEO Patrick Quinlan (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was your next move after you came out of school? It sounds like you came back to Denver?

Patrick Quinlan: I did. I’d been planning on joining the Peace Corps and was accepted, but due to some health issues, I was not able to go forward with my training. I needed a job. So, I got a job at a small company that sold recording systems for businesses. But I got fired within a week, because it didn’t make sense to me what they were asking me to do.

I apparently gave too strong of an opinion to the owner on how he should run his business. I ended up getting a job a couple of >>>