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Raising $20 Million from Angel Investors: Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele Contorer (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You’re not going to become a billion-dollar revenue company in two years.

Lori Steele Contorer: No, the next presidential cycle is beyond 2016. The next one will be the 2020 election.

Sramana Mitra: You said you originally raised some angel money and then acquired the Australian company for stock. Given that you had all these complexities in your business where you had to go through this flat adoption cycle for many years, how did those investors respond to the market dynamics?

Lori Steele Contorer: That has been an interesting journey. My first angel round was $500,000. Since the company began, we’ve raised $20 million, which is all angel funded. >>>

Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 1)

The InfoUSA founders sold their information service business and reconvened to build InfoFree, a next generation Data-as-a-Service business. The company is funded with $15 million of funding from the co-founders, especially Vin Gupta, founder of InfoUSA, and is in the $5M+ revenue range and is now looking to scale to the next level.

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

Rakesh Gupta: I was born in India in the Himalayan foothills and did my schooling in New Delhi, which is becoming a tech town now in India. Then I studied engineering at IIT, Kolkata. Then I came to the US in 1986 to do my Master’s in Computer Science and Operations Research. That launched me into the corporate world. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: eMazzanti CEO Carl Mazzanti (Part 1)

Carl has bootstrapped eMazzanti using services to close to $10M, maintaining a 20% y-o-y growth rate.

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

Carl Mazzanti: I was born in Pennsylvania. I come from a military family. A joke that I used as a kid was, “My parents moved around a lot, but I always found them.” Because of that, me and my brother are more outgoing than the rest.

I grew up in New Jersey. I went to school in France, Hong Kong, and Georgetown University. After school, I moved back to New Jersey to be around my family and take a leadership development program with Lucent Technologies. From there, they put me through classes at Wharton and NYU to increase my business acumen. >>>

Raising $20 Million from Angel Investors: Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele Contorer (Part 5)

Lori Steele Contorer: We began to focus on United States for serving overseas and military voters. We did that because the numbers were staggering. 70% of the time that people tried to vote from abroad, their votes weren’t counted. That’s not because governments don’t count the vote unless they have to. That’s a misperception. Governments always have to account all the ballots that come in as long as they come in on time. Because of the challenges of voting from abroad with the mail, that wasn’t happening.

We helped to get a law passed in 2009 that required every State in the US to offer digital ballots to their overseas voters. They could still choose to vote by mail if they wanted to but we were going to give them the ability to offer a secure digital ballot. That’s where the big change in the market began. I’m beginning to see that sort of change not just in United States but internationally.

Sramana Mitra: We have no idea what the size is of your company or how you’ve grown through the years. I need something to anchor the story in. >>>

Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll tell you one thing that I disagree with in what you said in this particular comment. I think you actually grew perfectly reasonably from a SaaS business model point of view after you made the switch in about 2010. If you look at your company from 2010 to 2014, my assumption is you have a reasonable growth rate. I don’t think it’s a sub-par growth rate but until 2010, you were not operating on a SaaS model.

Eyal Magen: That’s also true.

Sramana Mitra: We’re doing story after story of SaaS companies that start as SaaS companies that are scaling phenomenally fast. If you look at Marketo, for instance, it’s a rapidly growing company. These companies started as SaaS. They had no illusions of being anything else. They wanted to be SaaS. >>>

Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: By the time you went to VCs, you had proof of concept, plenty of customer feedback, and you were a proven quantity as far as the VCs are concerned. I imagine raising money was not very difficult.

Ron Bianchini: Right. I loved our Series A round. We basically went back to Menlo and Norwest. They did the Series A round for Avere. They’re just incredible partners. We have John Jarve at Menlo and Matt Howard at Norwest.

Sramana Mitra: That was in 2009?

Ron Bianchini: Yes, that was in 2009.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to ship the first product? >>>

Raising $20 Million from Angel Investors: Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele Contorer (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you were executing this project, what was the business model for the company?

Lori Steele Contorer: The business model at that time was to sell election software and services, probably on a per election fee as opposed to a SaaS model. We would get hired to do an election and we would deliver the software and the services around that. It was usually done either remotely by PC or at a polling station.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of average deal size were these projects? The government of Australia was your client. What scale of a client was that?

Lori Steele Contorer: It was definitely mid-six figures. They were pilot projects for very specific voters. It wasn’t a large election for all voters and it wasn’t small private sector elections. It became clear to us though after that, that a SaaS model made a whole lot more of sense. >>>

Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What are other highlights in the journey of building Gigya that are major strategic points where you went to the next level? Of course, one of the big strategic moves was figuring out what problem you were going to solve and achieving that product-market fit. It sounds like you achieved that in the 2006 to 2007 time frame.

Eyal Magen: Originally, we provided the product for free. We were thinking that sites would integrate their systems and we would find advertising opportunities around the data. Switching from a free model to a SaaS pricing model was a big decision. There’s something to be said about that because once you find out the right model for your company, a lot of things in the organization become clear because you know the metrics that you need to watch. Everybody knows that for SaaS companies what’s important is new bookings and your renewal rate. It’s the same for every SaaS company. If you’re an advertising company, you have a different set of metrics. >>>