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Scaling a Technology Company Against Major Competitors: Solix CEO Sai Gundavelli (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you work for Cisco? When did you finish the Cisco gig?

Sai Gundavelli: It was in 1996. I worked there from 1991 through 1996.

Sramana Mitra: That was when you started your first company?

Sai Gundavelli: That’s right. I started my first company in 1996.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about that company. What was the idea that you were going to build on? How did you get that company off the ground? >>>

Scaling an Analytics Services Business to $30 Million: Axtria CEO Jaswinder Chadha (Part 1)

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

Outsourced analytics services has been a popular category, especially in the US-India mode. Jaswinder has built not one, but two of these businesses.

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?

Jaswinder Chadha: I grew up in Punjab, India. My father was in the army, so I was born in the military hospital. My mom was a professor at a university. I spent most of my childhood at the army base because my dad was getting posted all over the country. It was more of a stable base for us to get our education. I graduated from IIT – Delhi and came to the US in 1990 for graduate studies. Then, I ended up going for Ph.D. as well. I went to Texas A&M. That has been my foundation in education before I jumped into the business world.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do right after your Ph.D.? What was the next step? >>>

Bootstrapping to $45 Million from Chicago: RKON CEO Jeff Mullarkey (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Would it be fair to say that you were able to expand your margin substantially through this process? What kind of numbers are we talking? In the kind of strategic shift that you described, what does that do to the business in terms of margin?

Jeff Mullarkey: After that, we delivered a much higher margin. Managed service companies tend to deliver 10% to15% to the bottom line. Professional service companies, if they do it right, may deliver 5% to 10%. We’ve a mix and we still do. We probably tripled our net profit and doubled our margin along the way on the same efforts. That was a significant change. It also gave us positive cash flow. In fact, a lot of these contracts end up being pre-date contracts. Sometimes, we have more cash than we have profits. You end up having cash and essentially you don’t take it as profit until that month passes. At the end of the year, we have more cash than we have profit, which is a great problem to have.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely. Cash is king. You have a lot more options when you have cash. >>>

Public Access to Startup Investments

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

In the United States, for the first time since 1933, you do not have to earn more then $200k annually or be a millionaire to invest in startups. As long as the startup raises less than fifty million dollars annually, anyone can now get into the game at the ground level. >>>

Scaling a Technology Company Against Major Competitors: Solix CEO Sai Gundavelli (Part 1)

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

Sai has had to compete with competitors who were eventually acquired by HP, IBM, and their likes. How does a small company compete? Find out more.

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

Sai Gundavelli: I am from India. I have done my Bachelor’s from India. I did my Master’s from the University of Oklahoma in Mechanical Engineering. It was during the very early stages of the computer revolution. I was fortunate to get an offer from Cisco when it was less than a $100 million company and when you could meet John Chambers in the cafeteria. I worked at Cisco for five years and was part of multiple projects. It was a fairly bumpy ride but I learned tremendously.  >>>

Bootstrapping to $45 Million from Chicago: RKON CEO Jeff Mullarkey (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You started with the model of doing value-added resellers primarily. VARs are not hugely profitable businesses as you know from your previous experience as well as earlier versions of this one. Can you talk about how the business model evolved as you made this next strategic move into the cloud data center?

Jeff Mullarkey: You’re 100% right on the VARs. That was our biggest frustration. We realized that the reason why a lot of these VARs go out of business is they eventually have a slow month. That slow month drains all their money because they don’t have enough to cover their bills. We, early on, started this recurring revenue model. I knew this was going to be very significant for us along the way. VARs’ growth is limited by the risk of the ups and downs. >>>

Bootstrapping All The Way: Infinitely Virtual CEO Adam Stern (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of the competition, when you started tinkering with virtualization in 2005, it was lesser known and everything was immature. Today, it’s mainstream and well-penetrated. What is your experience of the evolution of the competitive landscape in the market?

Adam Stern: It’s mainstream in that people know what cloud means. Quite often, I have conversations with decision makers and I tell them what we do. They’re dumbstruck. When people think of cloud, they think of what their iPad or their iPhone does. They think Box.com or Dropbox, but the concept of running their business applications from machines that are hosted on a virtualized infrastructure is still very foreign to a lot of people. The reason is that the push in the industry right now is very consumer-oriented. >>>

Bootstrapping to $45 Million from Chicago: RKON CEO Jeff Mullarkey (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about that next inflection point. What happened? What do you think drove that? What were the strategic moves that you made to get that next level inflection?

Jeff Mullarkey: It really started with us analyzing the value that clients actually got out of working with us. We were working, typically, with leading-edge technologies that customers were trying to bring on. We also had to do fairly large assessments, which were often bigger than the scopes for implementing the technology. We got very good at understanding organizations that were having challenges with executing IT strategy in general. We could see that sometimes it was due to design and sometimes because they were managing it incorrectly. We started talking to clients about IT maturity model. >>>