Bootstrapping to $30 Million from Czech Republic: Vaclav Muchna, CEO of YSoft (Part 1)

This is a wonderful story of a Czech entrepreneur, who at 22, at a time when his country was far from ready to support entrepreneurs, struggled through immense odds and has built a global business. Read on for inspiration and excellent lessons from the trenches.

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?

Vaclav Muchna: I was born in Czech Republic. I studied electronics in high school, which I didn’t like. It was not possible back then that would parlay into the software industry. Because the country was not so developed, access to technologies was limited. I really didn’t like the school. I was born and raised in Prague >>>

Surviving Near-Death Experiences and Going Public in London: Michael Hughes, co-CEO of LoopUp (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now? What are the metrics of 2016?

Michael Hughes: We went public in the summer of 2016 on the London Stock Exchange. Our revenue for 2016 is about £12.8 million. We will actually be releasing our 2016 results in a couple of weeks. We have to do an announcement that our revenue is going to be above market expectations. We have a little bit over 2,200 enterprise customers. We sell to small and medium enterprises and a lot to private equity. We have a comical number of venture capital funds who are our customers.

In general business, we sell to everybody from Hooters to Subaru. It’s all over the place. We have big offices in London and here in San Francisco, and smaller >>>

Surviving Near-Death Experiences and Going Public in London: Michael Hughes, co-CEO of LoopUp (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Explain the business model a bit. Secondly, describe the competitive landscape. Who or what are you competing against and how?

Michael Hughes: We built up all these systems because we didn’t have any money and it was all we could do. The business model that we followed is very much the same business model that is followed by most of our competitors. In the collaboration space, you’ve all kinds of competitors – Microsoft, Cisco, and now Amazon.

Still the big players are the historical PTT’s. There are several large independent, more audio-oriented players such as Premier Global. The guys that we >>>

Surviving Near-Death Experiences and Going Public in London: Michael Hughes, co-CEO of LoopUp (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: This journey of getting to profitability happened on a total of about $2.5 million?

Michael Hughes: All in all, it was a little bit more than that. It would probably be about $4 million. I would need to go and check.

Sramana Mitra: Now we are in 2010?

Michael Hughes: Yes. We’ve got to profitability. In 2011, the business was doing pretty well, but the growth rate had gone way down. With the team that we had, we hunkered down. We didn’t hire anybody else. We didn’t spend a dime on marketing and cut everywhere we could. In about 2011 as we got to profitability, we were able to invest a little bit of that money that was left over into experimenting with our sales team and doing various other things. We >>>

Surviving Near-Death Experiences and Going Public in London: Michael Hughes, co-CEO of LoopUp (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Timeline-wise, from when you started with the initial investment and went through these pivots, how much time has passed?

Michael Hughes: We started in 2003. We realized we were running out of time in late 2005. We pivoted in 2006. We started selling with this Blackberry bit. We had very strong growth in 2007, moving into 2008. We had a little bit of money that came from Andy Scott who was a friend from school who had made a lot of money doing GSM licenses in emerging markets. He came in and invested about $1 million.

We had another friend of ours who was someone I knew from my time in Spain. He went on to start one of the two VC funds in Spain. They invested about >>>

Surviving Near-Death Experiences and Going Public in London: Michael Hughes, co-CEO of LoopUp (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much money did you raise from this round? It sounds like it was a friends and family angels round.

Michael Hughes: It was about $400,000.

Sramana Mitra: What did you tell these people who invested that first $400,000?

Michael Hughes: We used to be called Ring2 Communications back then. The original idea we had was to basically turn your computer into a giant speed dial. If you send me an email and if your signature had your phone number, we enabled dialing on double-clicking that number. >>>

From Iran to Stanford to Silicon Valley Entrepreneur: Farnaz Ronaghi, Co-Founder and CTO of NovoEd (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: When you go into corporate sales situations, whom do you see in deals?

Farnaz Ronaghi: That’s an interesting question. I was telling you that we don’t exist as a tool in the corporate landscape. That’s really true. There’s another tool called Intrepid Learning that we sometimes run into. They are similar to us in the sense that they are not a learning management system but they are a learning delivery tool that focuses on gamification. We are a learning design and delivery tool. First of all, we have a great UX and a great UI. That, by itself, makes learning a lot more interesting.

Second, we bring the community to the class. Teams and groups are embedded into the learning experience. We run into them once in a while. Most of the time, >>>

Surviving Near-Death Experiences and Going Public in London: Michael Hughes, co-CEO of LoopUp (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you guys come together to start LoopUp?

Michael Hughes: We first met each other from 1995 to 1997 at Stanford. I had this fellowship, which meant that I had to go back to the UK. I went back for about nine months and then moved back out to California. I then joined a European-led startup called Pagoo. Pagoo was an early-stage VoIP player.

Back in the day when everybody was using dial-up to get on the Internet, you could not answer people calling you. What these guys built was a very simple system which basically redirected your incoming phone call, answer that call in the cloud, take a voice message, and then send that voice message back to a little app that would pop up on >>>