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Scaling a Cloud Telephony Company in India: Knowlarity CEO Ambarish Gupta (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: It’s not really operating experience. It’s consulting.

Ambarish Gupta: If you want to join PE, you need operating experience, for which you have only two options. You either work for a corporate for five years or you work for consulting firms for two years. Two or three years is quite a short time compared to five years. That’s why I decided to join McKinley. In two years, I did a lot of work with large banks and insurance companies.

In 2009, when I was trying to come out and join PE, the sub-prime mortgage crisis happened in the US and the whole banking sector collapsed. Companies were not hiring. I spoke with a bunch of my mentors and asked what I should do now. They asked me to get some more operating experience. That is how I thought maybe I should start a company again. The company is bigger this time. And it was good operating experience too. >>>

From Friends and Family Funding to $30 Million Exit: Vertical Response Founder Janine Popick (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: 2001 was a very difficult time.

Janine Popick: Over two developers that I’d worked with previously asked me if I wanted to start this company. I agreed. My husband agreed not to start the company with me, which was actually a great thing because he came on later on and helped us kick-start our marketing and sales. He and I are in the same business, which makes for a really interesting yet boring conversation sometimes. We came back to the US and I started talking to lots of VCs. They were very eager to take the meeting, but funding was rejected.

Sramana Mitra: At that point, you were basically discussing a concept? You didn’t have anything going. You were just asking VCs for money to start something.

Janine Popick: Exactly. I had a really great PowerPoint that looked like a product. >>>

From Friends and Family Funding to $30 Million Exit: Vertical Response Founder Janine Popick (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do for Xoom.com?

Janine Popick: I was in charge of all of the direct marketing and e-commerce. We did a lot of email marketing and a lot of marketing out to millions of people that would sign for their free webpage. We would try to upsell them clipart and all the bells and whistles that you’re going to put on your webpage.

Sramana Mitra: Email marketing at that time was quite new.

Janine Popick: We were like cowboys. There were no rules. People would sign up to get their free webpage and we would get their email address and try to upsell bells and whistles for their webpage, but we also try to sell them other things. One of my favorite stories at Xoom.com was we would offer a chat room so people could put chat rooms on their websites. We would monitor what people were talking about in the chatroom. >>>

Scaling a Cloud Telephony Company in India: Knowlarity CEO Ambarish Gupta (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

[Also check out my Entrepreneur Journeys book, Seed India – How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap in India]

Selling technology to small businesses in India is hard work. Customers are uninitiated to technology’s sophistication, and have expectations of high-touch customer service even when they pay little in subscription fees. Knowlarity is succeeding in a market where many have failed. Sequoia Capital and Mayfield are backing the company.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal story. Tell us where you’re from. Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Ambarish Gupta: I grew up in Kanpur. Kanpur used to be a great industrial town with a lot of government-owned industries. As a child, I watched this city go literally down the drain. I grew up in a business family. I had a lot of interest in Physics and Mathematics. >>>

From Friends and Family Funding to $30 Million Exit: Vertical Response Founder Janine Popick (Part 1)

While we’re spending a great deal of time analyzing billion dollar Unicorn companies, it is important not to lose sight of the capital-efficient, bootstrapped or minimally capitalized companies that have achieved success, provided significant return on investment to their stakeholders, and built value for their customers. Read Janine Popick’s wonderful story!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some of your background. Where are you from? Where did you grow up?

Janine Popick: I grew up in a small town called Wingdale, New York. It’s about an hour and 40 minutes north of Manhattan. It’s pretty rural. My dad was an engineer for IBM for 35 years. My mom was a nurse. I went to public school and had a great education, but I really felt the need to get closer to Manhattan. I went to Hofstra University, which is about half hour away from Manhattan. I studied Communications and frankly, >>>

Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of ramp did you see based on that?

Kiyan Foroughi: I think the most interesting stats I can give you are actually how well we did in the Christmas of 2014 versus Christmas of 2013. We increased our conversion rates by 90%. It was beyond my wildest dreams to increase it by such a big percentage. I had predicted perhaps 25%. We really improved our marketing efficiency. We are actually making 30% more on revenue by spending 40% less than what we were spending previously. We also fine-tuned our marketing to make it a lot more profitable and efficient on top of the website and the product.

Sramana Mitra: What do you attribute the 90% increase in conversion to?
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Achieving Product-Market Fit That Allows You to Build Billion Dollar Unicorns: Gaurav Dhillon, Founder of Informatica and SnapLogic (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Help me rationalize what’s happening right now in the market regarding late-stage valuation bubbles. We have two kinds of bubbles in the startup venture world. One is in the seed capital. In 2013, 70,000 companies were angel-financed. That’s too much actually. It’s great that they got angel-funded, but then if you look at the next level, it’s 1,000 venture funding or 70,000 paired down to 1,000. Technically, those companies probably need to be bootstrapped and they’re not going to be scalable venture-scale companies, which should not have been funded in the first place. A lot of people are going to take tax right off. That’s one part of the bubble.

I actually don’t think the early-stage venture capital Series A and Series B is in that much of a bubble. It’s more in the Series C, Series D, and in some cases, Series E, that is completely out of control valuation, right? Part of the issue that we’re going to have to resolve somehow is that the public market is not in a bubble. What is your analysis of this market? You recently raised money. What was your experience in navigating this market?
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Achieving Product-Market Fit That Allows You to Build Billion Dollar Unicorns: Gaurav Dhillon, Founder of Informatica and SnapLogic (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: This time around, are there any surprises in the product market fit process? You repeated the same process, I imagine.

Gaurav Dhillon: The same thing but with a twist. With Informatica, the timing was spot on. The change was happening in a big way. Year 2000 was coming. From the time we raised venture capital in 1995 to the time we got to $50 to $60 million in revenue in 1999, our timing was spot on. With SnapLogic, our timing was a little bit early. We had built out this technology. We had SnapLogic running on AWS in 2008. That’s like seven years ago. Enterprises weren’t there yet.

If you look at SaaS at that time, SaaS was a mid-market phenomenon. Among people using SaaS today, the majority of revenues and by far, the vast majority of profits for SaaS companies are coming from the enterprise. In fact, Workday is an enterprise-only SaaS company. They don’t even sell to mid-market. Their average deal size is probably $2 million. All these things were just coming out at that time. I think we were slightly early. Of course, we had the technology. >>>