Unicorn in the Making: Datrium CTO Sazzala Reddy (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Who was your first paying customer?

Sazzala Reddy: I’m not sure if it was Siemens. We had about 30 beta customers.

Sramana Mitra: What happens next in the journey?

Unicorn in the Making: Datrium CTO Sazzala Reddy (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The primary problem that you’re addressing is disaster recovery.

Sazzala Reddy: That is the number one use case we found for our platform.

Sramana Mitra: How did you settle into this problem domain? What led to this being the chosen problem to go solve with your founding team of five?

Unicorn in the Making: Datrium CTO Sazzala Reddy (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you work at Cohera?

Sazzala Reddy: I was there for a year or so. Then I started looking around. I had a friend who happened to be in a networking company called Cosine Communications. It was a slightly bigger company. Then the market crashed.

Unicorn in the Making: Datrium CTO Sazzala Reddy (Part 1)

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

Datrium is executing very well in the cloud-based disaster recovery space. Read on for the company’s journey so far.

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?

Building a Capital Efficient Startup from Nashville: David Stange, CEO of Beachy (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Where has Tennessee been an advantage? It sounds like you’re not scaling on the basis of these telephone calls. But you had to pound the pavements from a sales point of view through an online channel.

David Stange: Yes. Nashville has been an advantage for us because we have direct  flights to every market that we service out of Nashville. The travel within Florida is garbage. You cannot get from Panama City Beach to Tampa, Panama City Beach to Fort Lauderdale, or Panama City Beach to Fort Myers. It’s very disconnected.

PaaS: Bootstrapping by Piggybacking

We’ve discussed all kinds of creative bootstrapping mechanisms in this series. My #BigIdeas2020 contribution is yet another technique that I believe would be particularly relevant and powerful going forward.

Building a Capital Efficient Startup from Nashville: David Stange, CEO of Beachy (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It’s B2C?

David Stange: B2B. Our product is strictly B2B. We have a B2B2C element. We currently have hundreds of hotels that use the Beachy system. It’s a three-part solution. We have an integrated online booking engine. When I make my hotel reservation, I can see a map and I’m prompted to reserve my beach chairs in advance of my stay.

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to $25 Million: Percona CEO Peter Zaitsev (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You had a virtual company with developers mainly from Eastern Europe.

Peter Zaitsev: Initially, yes. We gradually expanded to other countries. Now we have about 35 different countries.

Sramana Mitra: It’s still a virtual company though.