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Building a Capital Marketplace for Mid-Market Businesses: Axial CEO Peter Lehrman (Part 1)

Capital marketplaces are quite the trend these days. This story traces the evolution of Axial. This is a very different marketplace from AngelList.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some context and background of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Peter Lehrman: I was born and raised in New York City. I was also educated in New York. I went off to college at the University of Virginia. I came back to New York. My timing of graduating from school was pretty bad. I graduated in 2001 from undergrad and 2008 from graduate school. When I came back from undergrad, I joined my brother who co-founded a company here in New York. I spent the first six years of my career developing that business with him and his co-founder.

Sramana Mitra: What business is that?

Peter Lehrman: It goes by the name GLG today. It’s an expert network that’s largely used by the world’s investors to make better investing decisions. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Wrike CEO Andrew Filev (Part 1)

Andrew has built a company with a rigorous data-driven approach. Learn how!

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?

Andrew Filev: I was born in St. Petersburg in Russia. I got interested in computers pretty early. I spent a lot of my childhood playing with computers, building and programming, and designing. I also had a big interest in other sciences as well. I competed in different math, physics, and chemistry competitions.

Part of my heritage and the reason why I did a lot of that was that if I go back in time and compare my upbringing with what I see today for my kids, there was very little entertainment. Everything was pretty scarce. I spent my childhood summers mostly reading books and playing chess >>>

An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What are some of the bigger strategic moves as well as accomplishments in 2013 and 2014?

Cameron Weeks: We talked about the big event in 2014. It was literally a year-long event living through that whole process and uncovering what went wrong, and building better control systems to protect against it. At the same point in time, we invested heavily in the product. We started off as a local sales company working with people around us. By this point in time, we have clients in all 50 states and multiple countries. It was a very risky move when we did it especially with what was happening on the sales side. We decided to invest in a new data replication system. We knew that one of the ways that we’ll be able to compete is provide a single solution to multinational companies. So something like ExactTarget that is headquartered in Indianapolis but has sales, marketing, and support offices in the UK, Australia, and the Asia Pacific market. No one was able to service that. >>>

Building a Sustainable, Capital-Efficient Business: Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now in terms of the scale of the company? Are you doing over $10 million?

Gleb Budman: We’ve crossed over $10 million a year and a half ago or so. It’s still growing quickly. We now store over 150 petabytes worth of data for customers, which is about a fourth of data that Facebook stores. It’s a pretty significant scale. We’ve done over 10 billion restores. We’ve also helped a lot of customers in getting their data back. The big opportunity for us now is this new offering. We certainly still are going to keep focusing on the pure $5 a month unlimited backup. It’s a good growing business. It provides the revenue and cash flow for the business. >>>

An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You brought this person on as CEO?

Cameron Weeks: No, I’ve always been the CEO of Fathom. We brought him in a very senior role as a Vice President. He was essentially supposed to come in and run sales and marketing, and control the revenue side of the company, which I agreed to. I’m a product person. I’m not a sales person. He ends up doing some terrible things and really underperforming on the job, and hiring a bunch of people into his sales team who were unaccountable. They ended up fudging some contracts to inflate what sales was doing.

Sramana Mitra: Yikes!

Cameron Weeks: For lots of reasons, we were slow to discover those issues. It took longer than it should, which puts us in a really terrible position. Revenues were inflated by about $2 million above where they should be. We’ve invested money into different resources based on those >>>

Building a Sustainable, Capital-Efficient Business: Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Content marketing is actually an extremely effective method of customer acquisition, but not everything converts. There’s content and then there’s actual conversion. The tricky thing is to make content marketing convert. There’s this brand awareness that does very well with content marketing and not in every category does content marketing convert into actual dollars. That’s the trick of content marketing.

Gleb Budman: Of the million people that read that first blog post, only a small percentage of them actually signed up for this service. If you get enough of a community there, they share and they spread it. That, over time, helps out. One of the unexpected benefits for us with the content side of things is that for the first eight years of the company, we offered unlimited online backup. That was the only thing that we offered. For a lot of the people who read our blog post, it wasn’t even a relevant thing. They were interested in the blog post but there was nothing for them. They were techies and perhaps were on Linux. >>>

An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: But your target customer strategy was local. That’s how you were getting these customers, right?

Cameron Weeks: That’s how we started. It was local. Once we had established the client base in the local market, we found a very well-established channel partner. They go by the term telecom partners. We found that were these partners in the world that helped broker, negotiate, and recommend telecom solutions for companies. It would range from one-person firms to very large multinational companies. We quickly tied ourselves to that world and became a part of those partnerships that were out in the conferences and events. For the next several years, that was our sales strategy. We ended up with hundreds of them that would, every day, sell our products for us. That allowed us to grow very quickly without having to dramatically increase the office.

Sramana Mitra: Did you raise further financing after the initial money from Frank?

Cameron Weeks: We have. Fathom took on an investment in 2010. Then we took on additional investment in 2013. Then in 2014, we took another one. So we’ve done three rounds at this point in time. We picked up some other VC firms along the way. >>>

Building a Sustainable, Capital-Efficient Business: Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You talked about the first newsletter that Amit Gupta got you into and you got several thousand sign ups from that. Is there a dominant segment type of users that stores their materials on your server?

Gleb Budman: It’s all sorts of people. Photographers are a large percentage because it’s completely unlimited back up. It’s one of the few places online where they can store their entire photo library at full resolution. They don’t have to worry about whether it gets down sampled. We have a very strong following of photographers, but we also have videographers, musicians, web designers, and software developers. We have a lot of writers that are on the platform who don’t necessarily have a lot of data but have data that they care a lot about. We also have a lot of genealogists, which was a surprise to me. When I thought about it, it made sense. These are people who spend a lot of time curating data that has been lost over the years, and trying to piece together their family history. It’s something where they want to make sure that that doesn’t get lost.

It’s a lot of people from all walks of life. A lot of people are fairly technical because it’s just the nature of those who understand that backup is important. In addition to the consumer side of things, we also have a lot of businesses that use us to back up their customers. We have a >>>