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Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So this is the story of your first company. What happens next?

Ron Bianchini: I stayed at FORE for about four years. In three years’ time, we were acquired by Marconi Communications. They acquired us and I stayed there another year. In 2000, I left. Having been a professor in the past, intellectual distance between the companies was very important to me. Scalable was a networking company. A year after the acquisition, I and a couple of other FORE colleagues got together and started a company in file systems. My next company was called Spinnaker Networks and we started that in January of 2000.

Sramana Mitra: One little detail in the first company, did you raise money to do that?

Ron Bianchini: Yes. This is a really good point of fact. For my first company, we went to VCs and basically, they saw two babes in the woods or rather two professors with a really cool patent who had never developed a product or built a company. For the first company, we raised our first and only round. It was a $2 million raised on a $4 million pre. For $2 million, they got a third of the company. >>>

Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen (Part 3)

Eyal Magen: We quickly found out that the best way to market our product is by working together with a small industry that provided content for Myspace pages. It was the beginning of the mashup era where you can grab a piece of code and post it on your page. This content could be a music video or a small game. We called them and said, “Why not post your content through email?” They started to promote us, but we looked at the very early results of the analytics and saw that we got a lot of traffic from these content providers. However, users weren’t converting very well. They started using the service but didn’t use our email. We did a very quick analysis and said, “We have an opportunity, which is we have hundreds of partners who are helping us to do something. But what they’re helping us to do is not really helping.” >>>

Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: We can go on and on about Computer Science, but what did you do after Carnegie Mellon?

Ron Bianchini: I graduated in 1989. They asked me to stay on as a professor. So, I stayed on and taught. I very much enjoyed Computer Engineering. When my dad was at NYU and even when I was getting my degree, universities were all about publishing. You went to corporations and they were panting and protecting their IP. In universities, it’s all about public source and getting things out to a public domain.

When I was a teacher, universities were just catching on. Stanford became very famous for their tech transfer. CMU had just started tech transfer offers. I and another professor wrote a patent on an ATM switch. It was mildly successful. We were able to write licenses for $2 million. Basically, the tech transfer offers were just starting. >>>

Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Eyal Magen: We went through the whole Internet boom. The bubble exploded and we had to survive. Eventually, we sold the company. When the company was sold, there was a comeback in the Internet and for raising money. Out of Hotbar, for example, came out seven or eight startups. These were people who were working on that company.

I also thought about starting my own business. I offered this opportunity to my two co-founders. Both of them were also early employees at Hotbar. The three of us were managers. I came to them with an idea. The idea was very different in many ways from what Gigya is doing right now. >>>

Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey (Part 1)

Ron is a fellow MIT alumnus who went to Carnegie Mellon for his PhD, and subsequently has done three successful systems ventures. This story offers insights into his methodology.

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

Ron Bianchini: I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York in a very large Italian family. If you put a dot on my grandmother’s house at 35^th Avenue and go out on a five-mile radius, you’d probably capture 30 to 50 Bianchinis. >>>

Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen (Part 1)

Gigya started off with one set of market assumptions, and along the way, pivoted to a drastically different market, addressing an entirely different pain point. Four years later, it switched from an ad-supported business model to SaaS. It survived all these changes, and has now built a robust company, fueled by over $100 million of funding, strong customer growth, and overall execution. Read this very interesting, decade-long journey related by one of the co-founders of the company.

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

Eyal Magen: I was born in Israel. I was raised here. I was interested both in computers and psychology when I was in high school. I think the combination of psychology and computers is something that is very necessary for being an entrepreneur. That’s my early background. >>>

A Textbook Case Study of Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bhavin Parikh, CEO of Magoosh (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What happened in 2014?

Bhavin Parikh: There was more growth in 2014. Also, how do we start expanding outside of GMAT and GRE? We realized that we could be a very strong company in GMAT and GRE, but to really achieve our mission and vision, we needed to expand much broader. We started thinking about the SAT more seriously. We started thinking about TOEFL. We started working on new products in addition to moving forward with our existing products. We continued to bet on mobile.

We’ve expanded now to paid advertising. We have done some paid advertising but we really started ramping our spend in 2014. Way back in 2010 and 2011, paid advertising didn’t work for us. My hypothesis was no one had heard of our company before. Because test prep is such a high stakes thing, people aren’t willing to buy a product they haven’t heard of. By 2014, a fair number of people had heard and used our GMAT and GRE product so when there’s an ad out there, they start to see all these great reviews. That’s when paid advertising started working. >>>

Bootstrapping from Belgium: iText CEO Bruno Lowagie (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What about business strategy? Not every company can, by the nature of their business, grow to $500 million. That’s what the VCs are looking for. By the nature of your business, how big a business can you build?

Bruno Lowagie: If we continue what we are doing now, I don’t think we’re going to be a billion dollar business.

Sramana Mitra: How big a business can you build? $20 million? $50 million?

Bruno Lowagie: The target is to go to $20 million over the next two to three years.

Sramana Mitra: Then what? >>>