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Bootstrapping from Belgium: iText CEO Bruno Lowagie (Part 1)

Bruno has bootstrapped a highly profitable company from Belgium. Now what?

Sramana Mitra: Where are you from?

Bruno Lowagie: I’m from Belgium.

Sramana Mitra: I’m married to a Belgian. Were you born and raised in Belgium?

Bruno Lowagie: Yes, I was born in Ypres, which is in the west of Flanders. I lived there until I was 18. I went to college in Gent. I met Ingeborg there.

Sramana Mitra: You’re co-founders?

Bruno Lowagie: Yes. We married there. >>>

From Y Combinator to Customer Traction and $50 Million in Financing: MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel (Part 1)

Eric and his co-founder Nikita left Facebook to join YCombinator to develop their idea for MemSQL. The company has blossomed into a robust enterprise software business with a solid customer base.

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

Eric Frenkiel: I was born and raised in Southern California. I studied at Stanford when I actually decided to specialize in engineering. I looked at a lot of schools and I thought that Stanford was the best place for me to grow and learn. I graduated in 2008.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of engineering did you study at Stanford?

Eric Frenkiel: Operation Research. You would call it industrial engineering in another time. In Stanford, it’s called Management Science and Engineering. >>>

Competing with Box and Dropbox: Soonr Co-Founder and CTO Steven Boye (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: When you win big deals with enterprise customers, what is it that allows you to win these deals?

Steven Boye: It is typically the quality of our products. Everybody that we compete with, they are currently Dropbox or Box users. Most of them are. For some reason, they like our solution better.

Sramana Mitra: Do you know why?

Steven Boye: Soonr wins business because we have the most powerful mobile file sync-and-share experience available: smart selective sync that allow users to take entire folders or subfolders on-the-go; full online or full offline mode; integrated document editing and annotation with built-in MDM/DLP security features such as remote wipe; and no additional software needed. >>>

Competing with Box and Dropbox: Soonr Co-Founder and CTO Steven Boye (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How many telcos do you have as customers today?

Steven Boye: I think we have three today. AT&T is the biggest. What we’ve learned is that telcos are hard to work with. They are good once they engage, but it’s really a long sales cycle. In the years since, several things have happened.

In 2010 to 2012, we basically found out what it is that Soonr is. Soonr became less of a telco solution and more of a cloud collaboration solution. Then we also launched Soonr for enterprise. In 2011 and 2012, the focus of the company became clear. It has been such a shifting landscape and you basically had to try and pivot all the time to found out what makes sense at any time. We have gone through quite a few pivots as you can probably tell over the years. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Colorado: InteliSecure CTO Chuck Bloomquist (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is your plan going forward? You’re about $16 million. The market has appetite for what you bring to the table. Is it just basically doing more of the same thing? Is that an accurate summary of what your game plan is?

Chuck Bloomquist: I definitely want to continue and expand in different directions. As you can imagine, the people who want the data continue to get creative with how they are going to get it. Today we see most organizations trying to present this in a retroactive space. If you think about malware and antivirus, it’s all based on signature definition today. Somebody writes an exploit and exploits somebody’s network. They call Symantec and say, “We’ll create a signature for it.” In our opinion, that’s too late. If you can define what it is that’s relevant to the organization, you now have a tool that you can use to look for it. Where are we going next? >>>

Competing with Box and Dropbox: Soonr Co-Founder and CTO Steven Boye (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to what?

Steven Boye: Now we come up to 2006. We actually got funding from a company called Clearstone Venture Partners in LA. During 2006 to 2008, we also got Intel Capital and Cisco as strategic investors. Now, we started getting real money to build the company.

Sramana Mitra: What was the basis of that investment?

Steven Boye: At that time, the product had synthesized more into a cloud-based service for online backup and collaboration. It then became much easier to raise capital. >>>

Don’t Pivot Too Soon: ADARA Co-Founder and CTO Charles Mi (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: They’re all doing this. They’re all part of your marketplace now.

Charles Mi: Yes. ADARA marketplace contains a lot of the travel technology companies, rental cars, and hotels. They have 100% control over how the data is being used. By putting transparency and control in place, the data suppliers have a lot of confidence that the data won’t be misused.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. In terms of building the company, you switched in 2008 to this travel data mode. Now, it’s coming up to seven years of executing on this business plan. You said you raised three rounds of financing?

Charles Mi: Since 2008, yes. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Colorado: InteliSecure CTO Chuck Bloomquist (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m asking a very specific question. Maybe I should ask you a broader question. Is this still a services company or is this a product company now?

Chuck Bloomquist: We are a services company. Products that we sell are developed by a variety of different organizations – Symantec, RSA, and Cisco. They have these tools. What we do is we build processes and people around these products so that organizations can see how data is moving and control how the data moves through the organization.

Sramana Mitra: How big a company are you today?

Chuck Bloomquist: We are a $16 million company with about 100 employees. >>>