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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ravi Reddy, CEO of Sunera Technologies (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Basically, as per the structure of your company that you described, you’re actually going in the right direction. If you want to run a custom solution services company, that’s different. If you’re trying to productise and run more of a product-centric company, you’re going to need to focus. Otherwise, positioning a product becomes very difficult across three different functional areas. That’s just not possible.

Ravi Reddy: Absolutely, I agree with you. I think your advice is quite helpful here. In the last 18 months, we’re seeing good adoption with CloudTestr. Our dominant market is customers who are hybrid versus on-cloud. Those are our target customers. >>>

Women ARE Raising Venture Capital: Kerry Cooper, CEO of ChooseEnergy (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s track the story of how you got this going. What was the beginning of the business? How did you get it started? Did you raise money or did you bootstrap? Give me more color on the entrepreneurial journey.

Kerry Copper: Our founder is Jerry Dyess. He built this business out of his home. Kleiner Perkins was looking at this space and they ended up meeting Jerry. They said, “If we put real technology behind this, we could make this thing work.” They hired a team out here to build the platform and to scale it beyond electricity.

Sramana Mitra: Jerry is based in Texas?

Kerry Cooper: He is. The supply set of our space is mostly in Texas. 

Sramana Mitra: So you were recruited into the project as the CEO? >>>

Resilient Entrepreneurship: Inspire CEO Brian Loew (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In that revenue model, what does an average deal size look like?

Brian Loew: I’ll answer that but also, the other part of research that has actually become larger than that is the market research side of it where pharmaceutical companies want to know about patient perspectives on things. Typically, a pharma will pay us an amount just to promote the existence of this trial and to do the screening for them. I combine that with the second one because in both cases, what we’re doing for the pharmaceuticals is try to find a very focused patient population and screen them by asking them questions.

I would say the range of these engagements is between $50,000 and $200,000. It ranges based on two things. One is how many patients they need and the difficulty to find that population.

Sramana Mitra: How many pharmas are engaged with you in this mode? >>>

Women ARE Raising Venture Capital: Kerry Cooper, CEO of ChooseEnergy (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Six years at Levi. That brings us to 2008?

Kerry Cooper: Right. Then in 2008, I left to join Walmart.com. I had a hundred-person team at Levi’s and I left to go to a three-person team at Walmart where I ran business development first. I had this entrepreneurial job. I launched Marketplace, which is the ability for third-party sellers to sell on Walmart.com. I also launched a couple of big multi-channel programs. It was an amazing experience to figure out how to connect the world’s largest retailer to the Internet. 

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at Walmart?

Kerry Cooper: A total of three years. I became Chief Marketing Officer the next year. The first year went into just starting business development. Every year at Walmart, they move you around. In my third year, I ran products for the global e-commerce team, which eventually became Walmart Lab. I had a global role working with Walmart China and Walmart Canada.  >>>

Resilient Entrepreneurship: Inspire CEO Brian Loew (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That’s great. In all two-sided marketplaces, the chicken-and-egg problem is huge. The fact that you were able to mitigate that with these non-profit organisations is a great strategy. The counterpart then becomes, what is the business model?

Brian Loew: We don’t charge anything for patients. Our customers are pharmaceutical, biotech, and device companies. Today, all of our revenue flows from industry. It comes today from, primarily, two sources. One is research. There are two kinds of research. One is the original idea of clinical trial recruitment, and the other is market research. We can do longitudinal market research and things that benefit from the fact that we have highly attached and engaged members. The other revenue source is advertising and brand promotion. Half of the money comes from pharmaceuticals learning from patients and the other half comes from pharmaceuticals promoting their message to patients. When I say pharmaceuticals, I’m including biotech and device companies. >>>

Women ARE Raising Venture Capital: Kerry Cooper, CEO of ChooseEnergy (Part 1)

Kerry was brought into ChooseEnergy by Kleiner Perkins along with the seed funding. Since then, she has raised $25 million and is running a traditional venture-funded company. This interview includes a discussion on the controversial subject of women in technology and venture capital.

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?

Kerry Cooper: I was born and raised in New Mexico. I was born in Santa Fe and raised, mostly, in Albuquerque. Both my parents are veterinarians. My mom was one of the first women to go to veterinary school. However, I grew up in a lower middle-class environment. We didn’t have much money. I started working when I was eight. I started babysitting when I was 12. I got my first job at Baskin-Robbins when I was 15. I think I’ve had a thousand jobs since then. That was the very beginning. I graduated from high school in Albuquerque. >>>

Resilient Entrepreneurship: Inspire CEO Brian Loew (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Social media hasn’t quite taken off yet. 2004 was the beginning of Facebook.

Brian Loew: That’s right. You didn’t have vertical social networks. You had message boards. There were some message boards, as you remember, that were good. We thought that there was some opportunity here. I got some friends with web background together. We didn’t have health backgrounds but we had web backgrounds. We said, “Let’s build a community.”

So we built the beta, and we were off and running. We raised some money and we got 1.0 off the ground. Early on, we had this idea that a good friend had suggested to me. I didn’t want to put ads on the sides of buses the way you would have in 1999. I was looking for some mechanism to attract members that wouldn’t cost a fortune. I was really struggling to find an idea. She said, “There are all these non-profit patient advocacy organisations. Every disease has a non-profit. You’ve got the American Lung Association, the National Osteoporosis Foundation, etc. About 70% of all these non-profits are in the greater Washington area, which was where I was. All of them had the need to support their constituents. What if you go to them and offered to be in their community?” >>>

Managing Multiple Pivots While Scaling to $50 Million: MotionPoint CEO Will Fleming (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How much of this is already in the market and how much of this is still in development?

Will Fleming: It’s hard to quantify but some is in the market in terms of capability baked into the current offering. Certainly, the majority is in development.

Sramana Mitra: This part of the pivot has not started impacting your revenues. Your revenue is still coming from the main core business.

Will Fleming: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: You said in 2011 you were north of $20 million. Have you grown significantly since then in the last five years?

Will Fleming: Yes, we’re at about $50 million. >>>