Long Road to Product-Market Fit: Allan Wille, CEO of KlipFolio (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Your company seemed to have somehow found its stride, but you left. When you left that company, what did you do next?

Allan Wille: It’s a long story. I’ll put out some of the highlights. We started Klipfolio in the fall of 2001. At that time, since all I knew was the funding scenario, the idea was we’re going to go out and raise money. That’s what we did with the first company. Of course, there was no angel and VC in their right mind who was going to invest in a pre-revenue startup. That was a very good lesson for me. >>>

Long Road to Product-Market Fit: Allan Wille, CEO of KlipFolio (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Very typical overfunding, lack of discipline story.

Allan Wille: It really is. I don’t think we’ve seen that kind of feverish pitch to the same degree. We saw IoT and Big Data, and now we’re seeing the same thing with AI. I think there’s a lot of money being thrown at some of these companies, perhaps, prematurely.

Sramana Mitra: There’s plenty of money being thrown around, especially in this whole unicorn phenomenon. You may have seen it already since you follow my work. We’re doing this Debt by Overfunding series right now.

Allan Wille: I’m a big believer that funding at the wrong time can be a kiss of death. >>>

Long Road to Product-Market Fit: Allan Wille, CEO of KlipFolio (Part 1)

Often, it takes a long, long time for a company to hit its stride. Read Allan Wille’s journey of great perseverance.

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?

Allan Wille: I was born here in Canada. Before I turned one, we moved to Switzerland. My father is Swiss and my mother is Canadian. I spent the first 14 years of my life growing up in Switzerland. My dad was a banker. Later on, we moved back to Canada because he wanted to start his own business. That has certainly influenced me. >>>

Growing Organically: Sebastian Kanovich, CEO of dLocal (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In the 1M/1M program, bootstrapping is a huge part of our philosophy. We know this from statistics that over 99% of the business that try to raise venture capital actually get rejected because they don’t fit into the venture capital model necessarily. We are huge supporters of the bootstrapping model. What you’re saying is completely in line with our philosophy. We are huge believers in the laser sharp focus of bootstrapping.

Why are you in Israel? You said your market is largely in Latin America. Did I get that right?

Sebastian Kanovich: Yes, I’m in Israel. There is a slight confusion. Our end users are in Latin America and emerging markets as a whole, but our merchants are either in Europe or US. >>>

Growing Organically: Sebastian Kanovich, CEO of dLocal (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You inherited 40 customers from AstroPay. Were you doing prepaid private label cards for these 40 merchants and then you switched that to something else? What was the case for the spin off?

Sebastian Kanovich: First of all, we didn’t want to have a company which was both B2B and B2C. We wanted to have one company serving the end users. That was AstroPay. Then we wanted to have B2B.

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Growing Organically: Sebastian Kanovich, CEO of dLocal (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the structure? Did AstroPay put in money into dLocal? How did you financially engineer this?

Sebastian Kanovich: We share most of the shareholders. dLocal shares existing customers from AstroPay. We lost money for one month but after that, we managed to break even. We’ve been profitable since then. We didn’t have to raise any money.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about the business of dLocal. How do you go to market?

Sebastian Kanovich: There are two ways for us to expand. We don’t have end users. We’re a 100% B2B company. One thing we need to do is bring as many merchants as possible to our technology. That’s one part. The other part is to have those same merchants go into as many geographies as possible. We >>>

Growing Organically: Sebastian Kanovich, CEO of dLocal (Part 1)

dLocal was spun off from its parent company with 40 customers. It never took any outside funding and has grown to 350 customers within a year. Read on for more.

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?

Sebastian Kanovich: I was born in Uruguay and that’s where I grew up. I lived there all of my life. I went out to study and then came back. Now, I am currently living in Tel Aviv. >>>

Competing with Giants: Colin Earl, CEO of Agiloft (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me similarly about how you position against ServiceNow and Apttus in contract management.

Colin Earl: It’s essentially the same positioning. The Agiloft platform allows us to do two things. It allows us to configure the product to meet the needs of an individual customer in a period of weeks and it allows us to guarantee success – to provide an unconditional satisfaction guarantee that covers both the software as well as the consulting services.

If the customer isn’t happy for any reason within the first three months, they can just call and say, “I’m cancelling the order. Everything works perfectly, but the CIO has decided that post-it notes is the way of the future. That’s where we’re going.” The reason we can do that is, first off, the product itself and implementation >>>