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Bootstrapping to $300 Million: Faisal Husain, CEO of Synechron (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the concept around which you founded Synechron?

Faisal Husain: The concept was based on being a customer of this industry. I saw a gap in the service that I was getting from the company out in the market. The gap was that they didn’t have sufficient business skills. The whole outsourcing model was very appealing to clients and they wanted to embrace that, but these firms really lacked sophisticated technology capabilities. They lacked business knowledge. They lacked an agile and iterative approach to projects. Those were the gaps I saw.

I left my job at Merrill and tried to start this venture that involved very high-end technology capability combined with very deep business knowledge, and what today we all recognize and call an agile approach. 15 years ago, there was no term for it. We decided on that vision and that’s what we followed. That’s what got us to where we are. >>>

Scaling a Technology Company Against Major Competitors: Solix CEO Sai Gundavelli (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch the questioning. Tell us about how your business has ramped. You started in about 2003 and you’ve, obviously, evolved and maneuvered well strategically. What has been your revenue trajectory? Where are you now? What kind of growth rates are you experiencing?

Sai Gundavelli: For the first five years, we were really struggling. We were trying to build the entire product. We were trying to educate the market. Average typical selling price was about $100,000 to $200,000. Later on, I would say it became around $250,000. With the Big Data product, the deal sizes are north of a million dollars. One deal that we’re signing up right now is about $3 million. >>>

Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry (Part 5)

Dave Terry: The company had been growing at a really nice growth rate. I think at that point we were in the Inc. 500 list two or three years in a row. We were really funding things out of profits but we had a few investors calling us constantly. We thought that we can keep growing in the self-funded mode, but maybe we should bring in some additional capital. In May of 2012, we decided to take our first round of outside investment. We took $3 million.

Sramana Mitra: What was the revenue at that point?

Dave Terry: We probably shouldn’t say.

Sramana Mitra: If you’re on Inc. 500, that information must have been public.

Dave Terry: Yes. I think we were probably in the order of $5 million to $7 million recurring. >>>

Bootstrapping to $300 Million: Faisal Husain, CEO of Synechron (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.

Faisal is one of those rare entrepreneurs who have managed to grow his business with no outside financing to significant scale. We discuss his journey here.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Faisal Husain: My roots are from India, but I was actually born in West Africa in Nigeria. My parents had moved from India to Nigeria in search of jobs and they were in the education field. My father was a principal and my mother was a math teacher. While they were doing their jobs and building their careers in Nigeria, I was born there. I lived in Nigeria for 13 years. At that point, my parents decided to move back home to India. I was then home schooled for about three or four years, and then came to the United States. >>>

Scaling a Technology Company Against Major Competitors: Solix CEO Sai Gundavelli (Part 6)

Sai Gundavelli: We also did two killer partnerships. One is with a company called Kronos and the other one is with EDT. We made them put OEM on our products. They also had a lot of data that they needed to archive. They’re implementing our product in all their customers. We’re getting all the seeding with this strategic alliance. That’s 6,000 enterprise customers all around the world.

Sramana Mitra: Terrific.

Sai Gundavelli: Then, Big Data really gave us a huge differentiation. Big Data should be part of your enterprise blueprint. The traditional hardware is not going to school. You need Big Data. We position enterprise archiving on Big Data and that gave us a tremendous strategic advantage. We are the only player among all the competition to offer that. Even Informatica, IBM, and HP are struggling to innovate. They can’t act as fast as we can. These two things really helped us.

Sramana Mitra: This is what I’m looking for – the real product positioning angle to see the differentiation. Do you just do archiving or their retrieval capabilities as well? >>>

Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Did it give you a sense of how much they were willing to buy it for if you built it?

Dave Terry: Absolutely. We established the price and had agreement on everything.

Sramana Mitra: What was that price that they agreed to buy it at?

Dave Terry: We probably shouldn’t get into those details specifically. Let’s just say it’s at our normal list pricing structure. All our customers pay based on the volume. Depending on the amount of transactions that the customer processes, obviously, there is volume discounting. This is in the orders of $10,000 to $20,000 a month.

Sramana Mitra: You had that level of validation from these three law firms. You recruited a CTO using a recruiter. Did you have to pay a salary to the CTO or did you get him on equity? >>>

Scaling an Analytics Services Business to $30 Million: Axtria CEO Jaswinder Chadha (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: This is a US–India model since Helion is involved?

Jaswinder Chadha: Yes. Two-thirds are in India and the rest are in the United States.

Sramana Mitra: Where in India is your operations?

Jaswinder Chadha: In Gurgaon.

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting in the story that you want to share? >>>

Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Given that was your analysis of the market, how did you get the venture off the ground? Did you raise money? Did you self-finance?

Dave Terry: It was just Alan and me. Our prior organization was an all licensed in-house model. We knew we wanted to build this entire organization as a SaaS infrastructure. We went out and got a very talented CTO who had experience in working with large, high-transaction volume SaaS operations.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get that person? >>>