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Competing with Box and Dropbox: Soonr Co-Founder and CTO Steven Boye (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of customer validation did you do at that point?

Steven Boye: I would say we didn’t really do any customer validation that early on. But we had a lot of background in office applications and helping people with Word and Excel. It was basically office automation or mobile enablement of people with their regular office documents. We were pushing the boundaries for what was possible with the technology back then.

Sramana Mitra: I see. Essentially, the funding that you were able to raise was based on your domain knowledge in office applications. It was not based on any customer validation.

Steven Boye: It was not based on customer validation. It was basically based on the prototype and the ideas we had. We had a product that we could show where you could install an application on your home computer. You can use your browser in your Nokia phone. You can have an >>>

Don’t Pivot Too Soon: ADARA Co-Founder and CTO Charles Mi (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Hilton was paying US Airways every time they were accessing a data set and you were getting a share of that revenue. Was that your business model?

Charles Mi: We get paid and share it with US Airways. Just like a consumer who’s purchasing from Amazon, you have to pay Amazon. Amazon then gives the money to the merchant.

Sramana Mitra: So the transaction completes on your side and you do the collection.

Charles Mi: Yes. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Colorado: InteliSecure CTO Chuck Bloomquist (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In that process, was there any other kind of segmentation? Were there any particular styles of CIOs or IT organizations that were resonating with you? Maybe a vertical or any kind and size of business?

Chuck Bloomquist: Absolutely. There were certain verticals that were more responsive than others. The first one that we found were the banking and finance. They were the early adopters of this type of technology. Rapidly, we saw the medical space start to pick this up as well. It transitioned into the insurance. Now, there are a lot of manufacturers whether it’s in the medical space or parts manufacturing. They are rapidly advancing into content analytics and the idea of protecting critical assets.

Sramana Mitra: How much were you able to gather in terms of these service contracts to get the ball rolling? >>>

Competing with Box and Dropbox: Soonr Co-Founder and CTO Steven Boye (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Even though it was registered in Delaware, you were running the company in Denmark?

Steven Boye: You can say that the company’s engineering department was running out of Denmark. It’s actually the same today with Soonr. All engineering operations are done here in Denmark. All the financial, PR, HR, and business development operations are done in Silicon Valley.

Sramana Mitra: Are you the CEO of the company?

Steven Boye: No, I am the CTO of the company. Martin was the original CEO when we started the company. Initially, it was just the three of us.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to that point when you were starting. You said you got funded right away. >>>

Don’t Pivot Too Soon: ADARA Co-Founder and CTO Charles Mi (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to 2008. You decided to do this vertical solution for the travel agency. Who were the first customers that you went after and who bought into your value proposition?

Charles Mi: The first customer we went after was US Airways, partly due to the personal relationship that Layton has with the US Airways marketing team. Part of it was that 2008 was a difficult time for airlines. Not a lot of people were travelling. A lot of airlines had gone for bankruptcy protection. That was also the time when the predominant airlines were looking for other sources of revenue. If you remember, that’s when they started charging you for bags. They started charging your first bag. They also charged your second bag. You also don’t get food for free anymore. Airlines were having trouble in sustaining themselves. They were looking for different ways to get their revenues.

That was the perfect storm for us. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Colorado: InteliSecure CTO Chuck Bloomquist (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You’re talking about protecting critical assets essentially.

Chuck Bloomquist: Yes, you can call it critical assets. Whether it’s IP or regulatory control data, to us, it didn’t really matter.

Sramana Mitra: How did you determine what was categorized as critical assets?

Chuck Bloomquist: It’s based on value to the organization. If your revenue for 2015 was based on this formula or this design drawing, then it has value to the organization.

Sramana Mitra: I got it. Those are the characteristics. How did you determine them algorithmically? Did it have to be manually categorized or was the algorithm able to auto-categorize? >>>

Competing with Box and Dropbox: Soonr Co-Founder and CTO Steven Boye (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I remember NetObjects.

Steven Boye: I moved back to Silicon Valley and lived there for a few years. NetObjects went public. My wife is a professor at a university in Denmark. She wanted to continue her career in Denmark, so we moved the family back to Denmark again.

Sramana Mitra: What year was that?

Steven Boye: This was in 1998. Since 1998, I’ve been living in Denmark.

Sramana Mitra: What did you decide to do when you moved back to Denmark? >>>

Don’t Pivot Too Soon: ADARA Co-Founder and CTO Charles Mi (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What happened to that company?

Charles Mi: We lasted for three and a half years. It was a very interesting idea, but we didn’t really discover the business potential. We also tried to make different things at a time instead of focusing on one thing. We were doing three different products at the same time. We were also doing advertising and analytics.

What happened was some of the key data sources that we had went away, one of which was Myspace. We crawl the profiles and also get lots of information from blogging platforms like Live Journal, Bazinga, and also MSN 360. A lot of these blogging platforms also went away. Our data sources dropped significantly, making our search engine a little insignificant. >>>