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Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I got it. How many people did you have in the company that you were essentially renting out?

Michael Sikorsky: It was very fast. It went from 0 to 65 people in nine months.

Sramana Mitra: Then you sold the company to whom?

Michael Sikorsky: To my business partner. It was almost like an accident. Again, you can almost see the pattern. I was like, “I don’t want to be at this company. I don’t know what I’m going to do. How about I try this idea?” I just wasn’t super passionate about it.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a very common idea that these various offshore firms are doing. You can put a little lipstick on that but it is not a great business.

Michael Sikorsky: No, it’s not. >>>

An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks (Part 1)

It’s always thrilling for me to encounter entrepreneurs who are succeeding in off-center places, and Fathom Voice is a great example of one from Indiana.

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

Cameron Weeks: I was born in a very small town in Indiana, just north of Indianapolis. Its total population was just 3,000. My graduating class had around 56 people.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you study? >>>

Building a Sustainable, Capital-Efficient Business: Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman (Part 1)

I keep harping on sustainable growth, not growth at all cost. Gleb tells the story of his company, built block by block with sustainability in focus.

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?

Gleb Budman: I was born in the former Soviet Union in Russia. I was there for about the first five years of my life before my parents were able to get us out, which I’m eternally grateful for. We immigrated through Austria, Italy, and landed in Pennsylvania where we spent about a year and a half trying to make ends meet before my dad got an interview out here in Silicon Valley. He came on a trip out here for the interview and looked up at the sky and said, “There’s this glowing thing in the sky and the rivers don’t catch fire. This is amazing.” We got all of our stuff packed up in a big truck. By 1981, we were in Silicon Valley and I’ve spent most of my time between San Jose and Berkeley and everything in between. >>>

Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Give me the chronology of it. You didn’t mention raising money at any of these points.

Michael Sikorsky: I raised right away as I started the company.

Sramana Mitra: In Alberta?

Michael Sikorsky: Yes, in Alberta. I presented to 11 investors when I was 22. Just to tell you a neat story there, the presentation I had given was horrible. I didn’t know that it was horrible. I realized as they asked me the questions that I didn’t have answers to any of the questions, and I didn’t have the thinking that they wanted me to have. Just their questions were enough for me to reflect.

Sramana Mitra: Why did they give you money?

Michael Sikorsky: I asked them that exact same question. We had sold the company to an American firm. Everyone was getting their checks at the end. I actually pulled aside one of the guys that I had the best relationship with and I said, “I just want to ask you. That was the worst >>>

Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This is a very common scenario in technologies trying to start their first ventures. They end up building technology, which essentially turns out to be a solution looking for a problem to solve. How did you maneuver out of that situation?

Michael Sikorsky: As you’re in that situation, you can feel it but you can’t connect. Whatever you have, people just don’t want, but they’re willing to keep talking to you because they somehow can sense the value. They can somehow sense that you have some expertise. Through that, all of a sudden, opportunities emerged where essentially, people who were working with us who were business owners were then giving me feedback like, “What you really need to do is say that this part of the framework is for e-commerce engines. This is how e-commerce engines can plug it in.” Another would say, “You need to take this piece and this piece and chop it out of the framework, and call that X.” I would say being phenomenally open and phenomenally coachable was important because I think of it as just swimming in the ecosystem. You start to hear which way to go.

Sramana Mitra: Who coached you through that transition? >>>

Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What specifically did you do as you started this company?

Michael Sikorsky: I got the best term for it from Michael Gerber. I actually had an entrepreneurial fever and had no clue what I had to do next. I just decided to do it. It’s not something I would recommend. I had only been working for about five and a half months. Through that lens, it wasn’t like I was used to working or anyone who’s dependent on me. If I reflect back, I started running experiments to try to figure out what people would buy. If I had known that I was running experiments and had thought about that more wisely, you could have been smarter and faster on how you ran the experiments. Some of the experiments weren’t conducted wisely and maybe ran longer than they needed to as you’re trying to hunt around.

Sramana Mitra: In those experiments, what did you learn?

Michael Sikorsky: For me, the biggest thing was that it takes a lot for the business to understand how technology can transform it, and there’s a lot of hesitation. Against the backdrop of the upcoming trend of the Internet, I was trying to build software to try to do different things in >>>

Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of company did you join?

Michael Sikorsky: It was a supervised control and data acquisition company. They sold software to pipeline companies that wanted to monitor what’s going on across all their pipelines. What is the pressure? What is going on? There is a visualization aspect, remote monitoring, and then there’s a hardware aspect. It actually had 10 to 12 names in the last 15 years because it constantly got rebought. At this time, I had some commercial shareware. I think they liked me because I was already a software person. After school, I’ve already sold shareware. I’ve done commercial software projects. That was my thing. I have always loved software. >>>

Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 1)

The story of a serial entrepreneur from an off-center place, this time Alberta, Canada.

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?

Michael Sikorsky: I was born in Alberta, which is in Canada in 1972. I’m almost 43. I ping ponged between two cities Remington and Calgary. My parents were half trying to be entrepreneurs and half trying to find work. My dad has a fireplace reseller company and my mom had a daycare. My dad actually lost most of the family’s money in the fireplace reseller business. That was an extreme lesson when I was younger. It was a little fuzzy. I don’t think anyone really wants to talk about all the real parts of the story as you get older. I got to see that growing up.

In my brain, I just fell in love with computers. I had worked at fast food restaurants and saved up enough money to buy my first computer. I think I was about 11 or 12 then. That was the thing that changed the course of my life. I totally fell in love with computers. I started >>>