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From an EIR Experiment to a Fast Growth SaaS Company: Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: At this point, you had a bunch of customers. You had validation. Did your venture fund write you a check?

Joe Kinsella: They did not. Along the way, I had a series of advisors. I had six advisors. The goal there was to really find people who complemented my skills. I had just two questions I wanted to ask them. One is, “Should I continue bootstrapping this business or should I raise money? If I should raise money, will it be a seed round or an A round?” The second one is, “Do I hire a CEO?” It was a great discussion.

The net result was to go straight for an A round and hire a CEO. Before I raised the A round, I figured I’ll bring the CEO on board. Dan was CEO at Silverback. I sat down with Dan and reviewed everything together. He looked at me and said, “Why am I not your CEO?” At that time, Dan had been building out the Entrepreneur Center over at UMass Boston. I knew from earlier that he had been thinking about doing a startup at some point in the future. The timing just aligned. >>>

Greece Has A New Atlas: Marine Traffic CEO Demitris Memos (Part 1)

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

The morning that Brexit sent shockwaves through the world economy, I spoke with Demitris Memos who is building a nicely scaling, bootstrapped SaaS company from Athens, Greece. It was thrilling to hear a story of success and hope against the larger backdrop of doom and gloom.

Greece and Europe need more of them.

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

Demitri Memos: I’m from Greece.

Sramana Mitra: You grew up in Greece? >>>

From an EIR Experiment to a Fast Growth SaaS Company: Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Can you backtrack for me for a second and answer a couple of questions before we get to this point? I have a bit of a gap in the process here. You said you were running a bunch of experiments and one of them turned into this situation. How many such experiments around different product hypothesis did you run?

Joe Kinsella: It wasn’t product hypothesis. I knew the business I was starting was management of cloud infrastructure in some way, shape, or form. It was taking different hypotheses where the market could go in different directions in trying to understand how people were thinking about this problem. I ran, at least, six experiments.

Sramana Mitra: You were going to do something in cloud infrastructure management and you were just trying to find the angle through which to get in. >>>

A Late Bloomer on Building a Legitimate Unicorn: Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What about funding?

Peter Gassner: We had funding from angel investors. We started off with $3 million. Then we said, “This is good, but we need some funding from outside. We were looking for validation and professional funding, and the things that a VC could bring.” We raised $4 million. We thought we needed the money, but it turns out we didn’t actually need that money. We never actually dipped into that $4 million. The sales came faster than we thought. I didn’t know what I was doing there, and I got lucky.

Sramana Mitra: How did Emergence find you? At that time, Emergence was just starting to evolve. I’ve known them for a long time. I’m friends with Brian Jacobs.

Peter Gassner: There’s a funny story there. We were raising funds in 2008, which wasn’t the prime time for fundraising. We said, “We’re doing this industry-specific thing.” We’re building on Salesforce. The prevailing wisdom from all the VCs was, “That’s a very small market. You’re building on >>>

From an EIR Experiment to a Fast Growth SaaS Company: Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What year are we now?

Joe Kinsella: 2012.

Sramana Mitra: What was the relationship with Northbridge? Is that the company that had funded the company that you went to work for?

Joe Kinsella: Yes, Northbridge was one of the investors in Silverback. One of the partners there, Jeff McCarthy, was on the Board at Silverback. I looked at two firms for an EIR. I also looked at a newer firm in Boston. I ended up deciding to go with Northbridge.

Sramana Mitra: How did you utilize your EIR time?

Joe Kinsella: I needed the brand to work under. As I started making calls and engaging with people, I had something more than just me as a one-person >>>

A Late Bloomer on Building a Legitimate Unicorn: Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner (Part 6)

Peter Gassner: The thing that most people thought why it wouldn’t be good was that they’d say, “Hey, there are no big companies doing pharmaceutical CRM. Therefore, it’s not possible to build a big company doing it. What do you mean you will build your product on somebody else’s platform? Nobody had done that before. By the way, don’t you know that nobody would be able to buy you other than the company you’re building the platform on. There’s no exit. This is an absolute dead end.”

I didn’t take that as discouragement. I took that as encouragement. By the way, the guys who started Peoplesoft made this big bet. They were going to develop this client server on OS2. People thought, “You’re crazy. You make money on mainframe software. You don’t make money peddling around on this other thing.” They had to pivot, but they made it. >>>

From an EIR Experiment to a Fast Growth SaaS Company: Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Did you go work for Dell?

Joe Kinsella: I did. I like to tell people that I spent three years at Dell, two of which I can explain because I was under a contract. I wasn’t sure why I stayed the third year. Dell is a great company, but I’m a software person.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a hardware company.

Joe Kinsella: It’s better now. I noticed this morning, they actually sold out their software group. At that time, it was really hard because I think they were trying to morph from system integrator DNA into hardware DNA. There was a very early form of that software group where Dell was doing acquisitions on a steady basis. One of the West Coast companies that was acquired was Evergreen. They had a whole series of SaaS acquisitions. >>>

A Late Bloomer on Building a Legitimate Unicorn: Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where did you find traction? In building the product for the pharmaceutical industry, how did you scope the product? Did you have some anchor customers?

Peter Gassner: This wasn’t that complex really. This was pharmaceutical CRM. We just decided to go there. It’s a known area and these companies had systems for it. Either they were custom-made or they bought it from customized vendors.

Sramana Mitra: What’s special about pharmaceutical CRM that is dramatically different from a Salesforce system? >>>