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Bootstrapping in Minnesota: Praful Saklani, CEO of Pramata (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What are the significant developments in 2008 and 2009? How is the company growing now?

Praful Saklani: This is where it gets interesting and fun. 2008 was a phenomenal year for us. We started to see traction with the use cases around understanding the risk inherent in your relationships and how you comply around those risks. I’ve been really talking to a lot of legal departments and finance groups who really need to get their arms around that. If you recall the mid-2000s, it was the post Sarbanes-Oxley era when everybody was concerned with those topics. That was very much in line the zeitgeist of the time.

Then in 2009, the whole world changed. The risk of today was a lot greater than any potential risk 10 years from now. The whole notion of what was important to a customer from an enterprise perspective started to evolve very rapidly. That was a challenge to us. We were seeing some good traction and growth and added some key customers during that time. Suddenly, we realized that the budgets around >>>

Bootstrapping to $55 Million from Rural Minnesota: Tom Fallenstein, CEO of Fun.com (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Wow! That’s 2010. What happens next? In 2011 to 2013, what are the next major moves?

Tom Fallenstein: An acquisition that I’ve been looking to try to get for the last five years just happened about 18 months ago. We acquired the domain name fun.com. That’s ultimately the domain I wanted to expand into every type of product. We’ve got a unique culture here. It’s fun. It’s like a small town Google. We’re all super nerdy and geeky. We love all the pop culture pieces. >>>

Bootstrapping in Minnesota: Praful Saklani, CEO of Pramata (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to what timeframe?

Praful Saklani: That brings us to probably mid to late 2007. There’s a second piece that I’d like to add to this. As we were developing this, it wasn’t just about a technology product model that we built. We actually built a whole service and delivery model around it. One of the things that we identified in our discussions with potential customers was that their issue was only partially a technological problem. Yes, they didn’t have tools that allowed them to get at this data. A lot of it was around data integrity and data accuracy. Where is the data coming from? >>>

Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It has a gigantic budget.

Gaurav Rewari: Right. Stepping along the pillars, if you will, of IT service management to IT asset management, to IT project management, these are the building blocks of something called ERP for IT. They were imagining that into existence in the cloud. I felt that not only were they doing that replacement category for IT service management, but their ambition is also playing out on a larger scale with this ERP for IT. >>>

Bootstrapping to $55 Million from Rural Minnesota: Tom Fallenstein, CEO of Fun.com (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Wow! It must have been very scary. How long did it take you to recover that $1 million from that domain?

Tom Fallenstein: It paid for itself in nine months.

Sramana Mitra: Awesome.

Tom Fallenstein: We bought it in January. By the time we made it through October, about 30% to 40% of our sales came directly from that website became 30% to 40% of our sales. >>>

Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year does that bring us up to?

Gaurav Rewari: That brings us to 2012.

Sramana Mitra: That was pretty recently.

Gaurav Rewari: Yes, but that startup bug I alluded to earlier hadn’t quite left me. It started biting me quite hard again. Our respective product lines at Oracle were doing really well. They were either number one or number two in each category. I looked out and I really felt like the enterprise landscape was changing on an epic scale right in front of my eyes. Specifically, what I felt very strongly about was the rise of the cloud delivery model. It was creating significant upheaval in a lot of established IT buying categories. We saw it play out in CRM with the rise of Salesforce.com and HCM with the rise of Workday. I began to ask myself, “What impact is this going to have on analytics?” Analytics has always been a secondary market. The idea is that if you can stroll into a company like we did in the mid 90s at MicroStrategy, you would see a lot of on-premise software. >>>

Bootstrapping in Minnesota: Praful Saklani, CEO of Pramata (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Which brings us up to mid-2000?

Praful Saklani: That’s exactly right. In 2005, I decided it was time to move back to the US for a variety of reasons. I wanted to get back into enterprise software and started to think about the things that either I had experienced as a pain point or my customers had experienced that would be really interesting to create a company around. That’s when I started to zero in on my experience when I sold Yatra and had to deal with lots of paper work as well as the attorneys and accountants coming in and looking at files. I remember there was very little automation in that process during that time. I started to zero in on how well-understood all of that information is and started to network with other people who would have done some other things or who might be dealing with that problem on a regular basis. That was really the seed idea that eventually flowered into Pramata. >>>

Bootstrapping to $55 Million from Rural Minnesota: Tom Fallenstein, CEO of Fun.com (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What next? What happened in 2006?

Tom Fallenstein: In 2006, we moved into a 10,000 sq. ft. facility and started the company. I hired my mom and two sisters to work full-time and started building out the websites.

Sramana Mitra: Were there other properties in 2006 or just those three?

Tom Fallenstein: No, we had more websites—superherocostumes.com, rennaisancecostumes.com and a few other exact match domains like that. >>>