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Bootstrapping Using Services: Bay Dynamics Co-Founders Feris Rifai and Ryan Stolte (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I got this. You had a bunch of partners and you were doing value-added type of work for these people?

Ferris Rifai: It was not reselling. It was more services-focused. They would use us as an extension.

Sramana Mitra: In that process of doing integration and consulting, it sounds like you were getting a lot of customers from these partners. That’s how you managed to immerse yourself in these customers, but I’m still looking for the nugget of what product opportunity you identified.

Ryan Stolte: That’s a great question. Take the systems management security products. The products that were on the market were focused on detecting things. They did a poor job, generally speaking, of turning the things they detected into reports, dashboards, and visualisations that the customer could understand and make sense of. They would go detect individual events. The niche that we got in as a consultancy was to help systems get up and running. Where we really added value was, “How do I take that raw data and turn it into a picture that an executive can understand and actually make an informed decision?” That really was the niche – taking that data and turning it into actionable business intelligence. That was the opportunity. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Bay Dynamics Co-Founders, Feris Rifai and Ryan Stolte (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you start this consulting company?

Ryan Stolte: 2001.

Feris Rifai: Precisely on October 16, 2001.

Sramana Mitra: You did analytics consulting. How long did you continue in this consulting mode?

Ferris Rifai: When we first started, we started with consulting in analytics and, in parallel, information security and IT. What we saw was a gap in the market that nobody was addressing. Through our expertise in analytics, we identified this gap. Then we introduced the product into the market in 2007. That was our first entry into becoming a vendor. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Bay Dynamics Co-Founders Feris Rifai and Ryan Stolte (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You were Head of Technology there and Feris joined as the Head of Sales?

Feris Rifai: Yes, I joined as Head of Sales and Business Development at that time.

Sramana Mitra: What is the name of the company?

Ryan Stolte: The company is called Caspio.

Sramana Mitra: Caspio is still around?

Ryan Stolte: It is. I can fill in the gaps there.

Sramana Mitra: Go ahead. Give a little bit of what happened at Caspio. Under what circumstances did the two of you pair up to start Bay Dynamics? >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Bay Dynamics Co-Founders Feris Rifai and Ryan Stolte (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Just one little piece of information, did the previous company where you were head of sales exit?

Feris Rifai: Yes, it was a sale to another company.

Sramana Mitra: Was it a good exit? Did you make money off that company?

Feris Rifai: Yes, it wasn’t just through the exit. I had done pretty well. Prior to the exit, we did a private equity infusion into the company. Parts of that was the management founding team.

Sramana Mitra: You had a successful exit in a company that you had joined and rose through the ranks. Then you tried to do a dot-com that was, timing-wise, not a very good time. Then you joined another company and that’s where you and Ryan met. While we are there, why don’t we stop and get a bit of Ryan’s history. Ryan, what’s your background? >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Bay Dynamics Co-Founders Feris Rifai and Ryan Stolte (Part 1)

Feris and Ryan wanted to work together on a new venture. They first built a services company, then introduced an OEM product, and eventually bootstrapped a product under their own brand. The company has recently raised its first venture money after many years of being in business as a profitable, growing entity.

Sramana Mitra: One of you should probably get started. I want to go back to the very beginning of your journey, and learn about your pre-Bay Dynamics story. Where were you born, raised and, in what kind of background?

Feris Rifai: I was born in Beirut, Lebanon. That’s where I was raised till I was 18 years old. I then came to the United States to go to college. I went to school at Indiana University. It was a great experience for me. Throughout my journey when I was much younger in Lebanon, it was a bit of a difficult upbringing because we couldn’t find a way to get safety to be a part of our lives. I think it’s taught me a lot. It has helped me be, believe it or not, very optimistic. >>>

Growing Your Mind from the Inside Out

Excerpt from the book Unleash Your Inner Company by Guest Author John Chisholm

In my mid-thirties, I accepted the fact that I’m gay. Many folks don’t see that as an asset. I disagree. It has been an asset for me in at least five ways:

• People routinely assume that others are attracted to the opposite sex. I have long known—definitely—that those assumptions can be wrong. Being gay has thus made me more willing to challenge routine assumptions and the status quo, making me a better entrepreneur.

>>>

Passion and Perseverance: A Positive Feedback Loop

Excerpt from the book Unleash Your Inner Company by Guest Author John Chisholm

In the first half of 2001, the dot-com bust, I would often wake up around 2 a.m. with sweat-soaked sheets sticking to my skin. CustomerSat’s second round of financing, long planned for that January, had refused to come together despite a flurry of meetings as we ran out of cash. Those nights I would get up, shower off the sweat, and try to get back to sleep. When my executive team and I finally grasped that the Series B round was not going to close, we huddled to decide what to do. First, we cut our salaries, then several weeks later those of all our employees, by 10 percent; I cut my own salary and that of my CFO by 50 percent. Debating and agonizing over every individual, we laid off 40 percent of our workforce. In our all-hands meeting immediately after, as I explained to our remaining employees that this was the only way we could keep together and stay afloat, my composure collapsed and I broke down sobbing. Our employees stood stunned, sympathetic, and embarrassed. >>>

Buying Control Back from VCs: Jason Robbins, CEO of ePromos (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The scenario that you are pointing out is a scenario that a lot of venture-funded entrepreneurs face. Business is not the rocket that the VCs thought it would be, but it’s a healthy profitable long-term business that the entrepreneur may be interested in running. That’s a scenario where VCs and entrepreneurs have to sit down and go through this negotiation to set things on a different track.

Jason Robbins: I’m very fortunate. I don’t want any of your readers to think that mine is a normal case.

Sramana Mitra: No, it’s not. It’s not a normal case but the scenario that you’re describing – that after some amount of execution, the investors realized that they have not invested in a rocket. The whole model is based on investing in rockets.

Jason Robbins: It’s one out of 100. That’s right. >>>