Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Give me an example of your first customer who understood your vision and signed up. What was the process of getting to your first customer?

Hiro Yoshikawa: We started the company operations in December 2011. We launched the initial product in September of 2012.

Sramana Mitra: You raised venture capital before all this?

Hiro Yoshikawa: Bill and Morio led the first million dollar round in late 2011. We started developing our initial beta product focusing on the open source data collection technologies and also the back-end database and the data warehouse to enable the collective data to get stored and analyzed. We started >>>

Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You already started thinking about doing something of your own?

Hiro Yoshikawa: He influenced me to start thinking about it. I have to say that until I met him, I didn’t really have any clear idea about starting my own company. He was the influencer. We had joint trips together. When I took him to Japan, I was introduced to the community leader of Hadoop. His name is Kazuki Ohta. Everyone calls him Kaz.

He ended up becoming my co-founder. Kaz and I have a very good chemistry even though both of us are in the very same space. He was more like a community leader. My background was more in business. In the last three years, I did a lot of venture investments. I started spending a lot of time with him and learned a lot about real-world Hadoop use cases. Kaz was involved in many early stage Hadoop implementation projects. He was clearly very sharp and entrepreneurial. He started coming to my house in Silicon Valley. >>>

Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: As an anecdote, I was at MIT in the mid 90’s. Richard Stallman was there. He was one of the first advocates of open source. This was 10 years before the timeframe that you’re talking about.

Hiro Yoshikawa: That’s true. I could likely become the firsthand witness that Linux took to mainstream. 15 years later, nobody questions Linux or open source.The situation was very different when I started at RedHat. After those exciting years at RedHat, I was hired by a corporate venture capital firm called Mitsui.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get into their venture capital group? How did this connection happen?

Hiro Yoshikawa: One of the former GM of Asia at RedHat joined a Silicon Valley company where Mitsui invested. I remained very friendly with him. I visited >>>

Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 1)

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

A very interesting story of a big data infrastructure management startup.

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?

Hiro Yoshikawa: I am a native Japanese. I was born in Tokyo in 1978 and was raised on the outskirts. Even when I was a very small kid, I loved literature. Mostly, I like Japanese novels like Murakami. Do you know Murakami?

Sramana Mitra: I do. Were you reading in Japanese or in English? >>>

Diamond Auctions Online: Benny De-Kalo, CEO of Worthy.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you today? What are the metrics of the business that you would like to share?

Benny De-Kalo: I cannot share all the information, but I can tell you that we’re growing very fast. We have over 80,000 items and their total worth is over $280 million. We have almost 5,000 buyers online.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of the buyer market is the 5,000 that you have?

Benny De-Kalo: Probably, there would be 30,000 buyers.

Sramana Mitra: So you still have a lot of headroom? >>>

Diamond Auctions Online: Benny De-Kalo, CEO of Worthy.com (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What was the inflection point of the business? When you raised A, you had a million in revenue but you didn’t have a full indication of how fast this was all going to go. At what point in the story did you find that inflection point and what was the driver of that inflection point?

Benny De-Kalo: When it happens, you really feel it. When we did the few million dollar-round, we got some indication but it was not strong. When we did the last round, we saw the demand from sellers. We saw that the demand was there. When it happens, you really feel it.

Sramana Mitra: Can you pinpoint to what you did to get to that point? To the extent that you can look back and decode your strategy, that’s worth learning. >>>

Diamond Auctions Online: Benny De-Kalo, CEO of Worthy.com (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Who’s shopping to whom and when? When Jenny wants to get a GIA certification, is Jenny shipping directly to GIA, or is Jenny shipping to you and you are shipping to GIA?

Benny De-Kalo: The way it works is, Jenny goes online and describes her item to the best of her knowledge. Taking her information, we use our technology to get back to her with a value. If she describes it correctly, we assume that that’s the value that she should be getting. If she would like to move on, we create a prepaid shipping label, which is fully insured. The item goes directly to be graded by GIA. Once GIA finishes the grading, we receive the electronic grading report. Then it goes up on auction. My team also takes the images. >>>

Diamond Auctions Online: Benny De-Kalo, CEO of Worthy.com (Part 3)

Benny De-Kalo: Let’s take an example that will illustrate it. Jenny just got divorced after three years. When she got married, they had bought a $14,000 diamond ring from Steve, the retailer. Steve bought it for $9,000. Now, she’s deciding to move on. She wants to do something better with the money. She first goes to Steve because she trusts Steve. Steve says, “No, I can’t buy because I’m in retail. I’m not in the business of buying pre-owned items.”

He does recommend Jenny to go to eBay just as you mentioned. She goes on eBay and takes a picture. She also tries to describe the diamond to the best of her knowledge. Her knowledge is very limited because she really doesn’t know the color or the clarity. What she doesn’t know is she’s not alone on eBay. On eBay, there are diamonds listed for over $3 billion. 95% of those items do not sell. They do not sell because Jenny and the others are not power sellers. >>>