Scaling to $10 Million: Humanity.com Founder Ryan Fyfe (Part 1)

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Humanity.com has operations in San Francisco, Pakistan, and Serbia. The founder lives in Panama. Yet another distributed software company that is scaling nicely.

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?

Ryan Fyfe: I grew up in Canada. I moved around a lot as a child. Both my parents were educators. My mom is a primary school teacher. My dad is a mechanical engineering professor. Through that time, we lived in Belgium, across different parts of Canada, and >>>

Building Fat Startups: Delphix CEO Jedidiah Yueh (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: One thing about these large VCs is that a first-time entrepreneur with no background in a particular technology area has absolutely no chance of raising money from a large VC today for a fat startup.

Jedidiah Yueh: I managed to do it as an English major in 2000.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, it’s a very unusual scenario and it happened in 2000. I can guarantee you it’s not going to happen today. Part of it is because the market is full of experienced entrepreneurs and experienced technologists who are doing things. If you have no background, you’re going to be competing with that set. >>>

Building Fat Startups: Delphix CEO Jedidiah Yueh (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: My next question is around customer acquisition. It sounds like this is all direct selling.

Jedidiah Yueh: Yes. We work with channel partners, but the majority has been direct enterprise software sales.

Sramana Mitra: Are there any nuances in that journey with Delphix starting in the late 2000’s as it moves along? Are there any strategic maneuvering that you did that is worth discussing?

Jedidiah Yueh: The world changed while we were building out the company. The movement to the cloud began. AI services >>>

Building Fat Startups: Delphix CEO Jedidiah Yueh (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You don’t have a Steve Wozniak that you’re paired up with throughout your journey?

Jedidiah Yueh: I had co-founders who were technical. Co-founders come at different levels. Some of them didn’t stay with the companies. I always found technical co-founders to help.

Sramana Mitra: It’s more incidental and not a soulmate kind of relationship.

Jedidiah Yueh: I wouldn’t call them incidental. >>>

Building Fat Startups: Delphix CEO Jedidiah Yueh (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the competitive landscape like?

Jedidiah Yueh: Two years after we started the company and we started marketing the product and the space, we had a competitor enter the market called Data Domain. In the end, both companies were sold to EMC. They were sold for over $2 billion. There’s another lesson there. When we were acquired by EMC, Data Domain and Avamar were similar in scale. EMC was looking at Data Domain as well.

We thought we had won when we were acquired by EMC. We celebrated the acquisition. Then the market took off around that time. Avamar sales increased quickly and so did the sales of Data Domain. They were able to capitalize on that and they went public. They were able to be acquired at a much >>>

Building Fat Startups: Delphix CEO Jedidiah Yueh (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to launch your product from that round?

Jedidiah Yueh: It took us a long time. This was my first time as a founding CEO. I’d never run a development program. I still don’t know how to code. We were four years late in shipping product. We shipped the product, but we had lots of function and quality issues when we first shipped. It took us about four years to harden the product until we could really protect large volumes of data from large enterprises.

Sramana Mitra: Your target was enterprise and not small businesses.

Jedidiah Yueh: Yes. Data de-duplication or disk-based backup is used by companies of all sizes. We were generally targeting medium to large >>>

Building Fat Startups: Delphix CEO Jedidiah Yueh (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Carry on. Lead us through the next phase of your journey.

Jedidiah Yueh: In some ways, since I’m an accidental entrepreneur or even a reluctant technologist, that was a bit of an advantage. I had lots of ideas and I had friends that had lots of ideas, but I wasn’t interested in starting a company unless it was really compelling. At the point that I had the vision for the product for my first company Avamar, I knew that it was really compelling. That was when I decided to start the company. The thing I love most about America and the entrepreneurial spirit of America is that you can be a nobody with no background in technology, but if you have a great idea, people will invest in >>>

Building Fat Startups: Delphix CEO Jedidiah Yueh (Part 1)

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

Jed has built two fat startups. This discussion delves into the nuances.

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?

Jedidiah Yueh: The funny thing is, I never wanted to an entrepreneur. I started out as an English major in college. When I was in grade school, high school, and college, I was never interested in technology. I was the guy who always asked my friend to help me set up my computer. >>>