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An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: From whom did you raise $500,000?

Cameron Weeks: We got lucky. We say that this company is very blessed. One of the partners that came in was actually a VC firm from California called Small World Group.

Sramana Mitra: Is this Frank Levinson?

Cameron Weeks: Yes, you know Frank?

Sramana Mitra: Very well, actually. How did Frank find out about you? >>>

Building a Sustainable, Capital-Efficient Business: Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You started this in 2007?

Gleb Budman: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: You self-financed it with your colleagues?

Gleb Budman: We did. It was definitely a long, crazy journey. Five of us committed to a year without salary. That would be the seed round. We then had two more people who joined us. We call them demi-partners. They weren’t complete co-founders but they did join very early on. They also committed time without salary, and they also put a little bit of money into the company.

Sramana Mitra: All of you had worked together before? >>>

The No-VC Semiconductor Company

An adapted excerpt from Tough Things First by Guest Author Ray Zinn

Micrel was launched on my personal credit.

I wanted to avoid venture capital and family loans when starting my semiconductor company, so I approached three different banks. I knew that banks didn’t lend to start-ups with unproven management teams and no products. But given that the alternatives – VCs and family – were unacceptable, I decided to make it work, to make the banks lend me kick-start capital.

Two banks flatly refused, and in such a way I assumed I might be escorted out of the building. But I learned enough from those encounters to plan the third attempt. That was the First National Bank of San Jose which later became Bank of the West, and we are still their customer today. >>>

An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It was kind of off-the-cuff basically.

Cameron Weeks: Yes. As we were running the web company, we were doing that.

Sramana Mitra: By the end of 2008, you had sold the web company, right?

Cameron Weeks: Yes, it was closer to 2009.

Sramana Mitra: What happened in 2009? What did you do next?

Cameron Weeks: The next thing we did was we decided to focus on the telephony thing. It had been sitting there making money from day one. People pay their phone bill every month. By that time, we actually worked the kinks out of it. It was reliable and it worked every time. >>>

Building a Sustainable, Capital-Efficient Business: Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I noticed that you said solve the problem that people were not backing up data. You can create back-up opportunities. How do you solve the problem that people were not backing up data?

Gleb Budman: The reason I say that what we were trying to do was solve that problem was because back-up solutions existed. We joked that we were 30 years too late to data backup. There was definitely no first mover advantage and it wasn’t the kind of thing where we’re like, “We should definitely do backup because no one else is.” We were not going to be first. The problem that we realized was that people still were not backing up their data. We wanted to understand a little bit deeper about that. Why were people not doing it? What could we possibly do to help? We explored a variety of different solution types. We explored making better software for people to back up to external hard drives.

We thought, “Something that would just make it easy for people to automate the process of backing up to their hard drives.” We explored the idea of backing up to existing services. We thought, “Maybe if people could just have some software that would back up their spreadsheets to Google >>>

Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What do you do?

Michael Sikorsky: I happened to be in New York. I was connected to lots of stuff around investing and crowdsourcing to venture capital. The iPhone comes out. I had that lightning bolt feeling when the Internet came out. Now, I’m a lot older. I’ve been through multiple companies. I even started investing in other people’s companies. My theory of business and my theory economics is now not completely naïve. You grow it over time. My theory was that mobile would be bigger than the Internet. It turns out that now, that’s true. I thought I wanted to attack this mobile space.

From Robots and Pencils standpoint, I wanted to do a couple of things. This was really important to me. I actually believe that if you look at pre-Robots and Pencils, every single thing that I have been doing has an investor and it has a forced exit and implied economic return. Over time, I have come to this realization that it just changed the dynamics of the firm. Rather than solving problems for our users, lots of times, we’re solving for the investor. The closer that I got to understanding investment and venture capital, the more I was like, “That’s how your business model works.” >>>

An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like around 2008, two relatively young entrepreneurs from Indiana sold the company for upwards of a couple of a million dollars and were starting another company.

Cameron Weeks: We founded this company that we operate today back in 2007 as a side project. Someone who we had worked with in the past actually owned a high rise building downtown in Indianapolis. He called and said that he was redoing the eighth floor and needed a phone system and if we could help buy a phone system for him. We were already at Purdue at that time. The story was we said, “We won’t buy you a phone system. We’ll just build one. Give us two weeks and we’ll have it done for you. We’ll come set it up.”

We retreated to my parent’s house. I was a freshman at college. We built this phone system. It was an utter disaster. The entire eighth floor is full of one to two person law firms. These are not huge firms. I quickly learned that attorneys, when their phones don’t work, are very mean people. >>>

Building a Sustainable, Capital-Efficient Business: Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year did this acquisition happen?

Gleb Budman: It happened in March 2000.

Sramana Mitra: Good timing. What happens next?

Gleb Budman: I worked there until it went out of business. It was going to get acquired by ComCast and I was on the team that was working to package the assets for sale. When they shut down fully, I left. This was in 2002. The Valley was pretty much dead. I had been working crazy hours for a few years at that point. I decided to take time off and went traveling for four months. I had a fantastic time on my travels. I was living on $5 a day. I was having a luxurious lifestyle sitting on a beach in Thailand, and traveling to New Zealand.

While I was on the beach in Thailand, I got an email from one of the people from the previous company saying, “Hey, we’re starting another company. Come back.” At this point, I was staring out at a beautiful sea with warm waters. I was certain that at $5 a day, I could pretty much retire >>>