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Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 4)

Manmeet Singh: I stayed on my course. VCs were not ready to put in money. If you look at history, that was the worst time to raise money. That was the time that I had to go from one angel to another. I did coffee and lunch where I invited 10 to 20 people. Five of them showed up. Everybody wrote a check worth $35,000 to $50,000. Basically, this is how I got my first $7 million.

Sramana Mitra: How were you pricing the round? I imagine the $7 million was not in convertible debt.

Manmeet Singh: You’d be surprised. $5 million was in convertible debt.

Sramana Mitra: Wow! I’ve never heard this before. >>>

Founding Elance, then Webaroo: Beerud Sheth’s Entrepreneurial Journey (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Up till what point were you operationally involved?

Beerud Sheth: I was there until 2005, or about seven years in the company. In 2001, we started this enterprise software and we sold it in 2007. While the company was heavily focused on the enterprise side, I was a little less interested in that part. I was itching to start something else. That was when I moved on with Webaroo.

Sramana Mitra: What was the concept behind Webaroo?

Beerud Sheth: Webaroo has been a mobile messaging company from the beginning. Around that time, which was pre-iPhone days, we ended up building up a text messaging platform. For a variety of reasons, we ended up focusing on Asia, India in particular. >>>

Making Mass Customization Work: Jodie Fox, CEO of Shoes of Prey (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Before you resigned, the site had already gone live?

Jodie Fox: That’s right. The website broke-even within the first two months. We still have savings that we were relying upon, but it meant that there was financial security in the company.

Sramana Mitra: When you say it broke-even in the first two months, what kind of revenue are we talking about? How many customers did you get in the first couple of months and how did you acquire those customers? >>>

Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: This is from VCs or angels?

Manmeet Singh: It was angels but most of these angels were working as partners in large VC corporations. They go personally to these conferences. They came by my booth, saw my idea, and asked me, “How many people?” I told them three. They were interested and asked me if I was looking to raise money. They asked me to come in to demonstrate the idea and product. I did that with one more guy. They agreed to fund it. They had checked my past experience. They liked that I was working at a large enterprise and I had done two more startups.

Sramana Mitra; All this is happening in 2008 or 2009?

Manmeet Singh: That was Oracle OpenWorld 2008. >>>

Founding Elance, then Webaroo: Beerud Sheth’s Entrepreneurial Journey (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The movement right now is very much in favor of Elance. oDesk is more our platform but it’s the same concept. The only way I can run the company is because of what you’ve invented. However, I have always been a bit early in things. I did a fashion company in 1999. That was completely way ahead of this time. We did not survive the dot-com crash. Timing is a concern for a lot of people who are trying to get it right. >>>

Making Mass Customization Work: Jodie Fox, CEO of Shoes of Prey (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking?

Jodie Fox: We went live in October 2009. The idea started to come together at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get it off the ground? Did you self-finance it? How did it all come together?

Jodie Fox: We bootstrapped for the first two and a half years and we put our own money over a period of a year. Each left their full-time jobs to work on the business.

Sramana Mitra: All of you quit your jobs to go full-time with the business?
>>>

Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 2)

Manmeet Singh: I started thinking of better ways to secure data. That’s when I started thinking about data masking. Data masking can keep the data relevant and useful for non-production, and in certain cases, production environment also and take the personal PII and PCI values out of it. I found a couple of people who shared the same ideas and we started this company.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of getting the company going, you said you raised $900,000 in the beginning. Before you raised the money, what did you do to validate? Did you have a set of early customers, or at least, a customer discussion? What was the validation process like?

Manmeet Singh: That’s a good question. My validation was my consulting group. >>>

Founding Elance, then Webaroo: Beerud Sheth’s Entrepreneurial Journey (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What in your background made you think about Elance?

Beerud Sheth: I think it’s actually connecting a lot of dots for me.

Sramana Mitra: It’s always easy to connect dots when you’re looking back.

Beerud Sheth: We actually approached it that way. As an Indian, you know that there are millions of talented people in India and around the world. This was enabling people to meet each other and find freelancers anywhere in the world. As a Wall Street trader, I knew that you create marketplaces when you take illiquid things and make them more liquid. Services are generally highly illiquid. Enabling the technology part was due to the Computer Science background. Lastly, it was just a point in time where a lot of focus was in the commerce of goods, but the commerce of services is actually a bigger part of the GDP of the economy. >>>