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Building a Mobile Security Company in Silicon Valley: Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder and President of Appthority (Part 2)

Domingo Guerra: During my MBA, I decided to focus on entrepreneurship. Santa Clara has a very flexible program and you get to pick a lot of the classes and core competencies that you want to focus on. I decided to shadow a lot of the professors there that had entrepreneurship experience. In the last semester of the program, I got to do a market research project for an entrepreneurship class where you basically write a business plan. That’s when I started evaluating the mobility space inside the enterprise. It was something I was passionate about.

We had all transitioned from the Blackberrys that were assigned to us to the iPhone. However, IT wouldn’t support it. Having a technical background, we figured out how to make it work on our own. It wasn’t necessarily the most secure way for the enterprise if they weren’t involved in that process. A good friend of mine, Kevin Watkins, was at McAfee. I started sharing ideas about mobility and explored starting a company. He was still pretty happy at McAfee, so he didn’t want to leave. >>>

Building a Mobile Security Company in Silicon Valley: Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder and President of Appthority (Part 1)

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

Domingo came into the market at a time when his original value proposition to enterprises wasn’t that urgent. Over time, however, the mobile security challenge has grown into a critical issue, and now the company is thriving.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Domingo Guerra: I’m originally from Monterey, Mexico. I didn’t move to the US until I was 18. Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. Monterey is very well-known for some of the largest companies in Mexico. A lot of folks wanted to be soccer players when they grew up, but I wasn’t very good at sports. I wanted to focus on academics and try to do well. I remember a talk when I was a kid where they said, “You need a lot of luck to do well in >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Taylor Tyng, CEO of Wiredrive (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: With the way you’re running the business today, have you identified levers where if you just throw money at it, you’re going to grow orders of magnitude faster?

Taylor Tyng: Yes. It’s actually been one of the most interesting things. The focus on the type of product that we were building was a little bit too broad. We had customers who were paying $99 and customers paying over $10,000 a month. By focusing our choices on segmentation of customer base, which were lower acquisition cost, and in turn created longer lifetime value, a lot of those trends within that segmentation led us to a focus that just eliminated low-value activities across the business.

Our ARPA has gone up on every single plan that we have. Even making the simple choice of focusing on specific areas of improvement has had enormous effect, which has shaped our roadmap. That’s just on the operations side of it. The other side that’s really noisy but is starting to pay dividends for us is, we are on the managing aspects of 360 >>>

Building a Cutting-Edge Telecollaboration Company: John Underkoffler, CEO of Oblong Industries (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you today from the revenue range point of view?

John Underkoffler: Our revenues are now well into the respectable double digits – that’s with two commas. We’re vectoring towards an intermediate goal of a hundred million dollar run rate. The proposition that we’re working on is broad enough for it to be a very brief and temporary waypoint. What we’re after is a new kind of computation – a new ubiquity for collaboration that’s supported by, rather than impeded by, these digital machines.

What we ended up with is almost infrastructural. We get a situation where the world is always on collaboration and, at every minute, you could be deeply engaged with a number of different people working on the same process and documents. Literally at an operating system level, the machine will expect that >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Taylor Tyng, CEO of Wiredrive (Part 5)

Taylor Tyng: By focusing on the organization and how teams collaborated, we could assist with making sure the intellectual knowledge was captured and shared. What we saw in our competing niches were people who were trying to solve more individualized and lighter weight problems. Another major inflection point for us was how cloud has been developing in a way where the economies of scale are also matching some of the needs for security. Security has always been a major focus for us because our customers are movie studios, television networks, and brands like Beats by Dre, Nike, and Red Bull.

96% of Super Bowl commercials go through our system and virtually, every major motion picture and advertising promotion goes through Wiredrive. You, pretty much, can’t turn on the television without actually seeing something that hasn’t been collaborated on in our system. Because of that, security has been a incredibly important for us and we implement at a high level across all stages. >>>

Building a Cutting-Edge Telecollaboration Company: John Underkoffler, CEO of Oblong Industries (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What else happened? It sounds like it’s a fairly straightforward enterprise software go-to market strategy. The beauty of that strategy is that you get these large deals and good cash flow. I think we understand that model. Is there anything else you did strategically that was particularly interesting?

John Underkoffler: We’ve made it sound linear and streamlined. The truth is, as with any young company, it’s a roller coaster ride and, for us as with many companies, there were near-extinction moments.

Sramana Mitra: What were some of these near-extinction moments? What were some of the challenging moments? >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Taylor Tyng, CEO of Wiredrive (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When did you launch Wiredrive?

Taylor Tyng: Wiredrive was officially founded as a sole business in 2008, but its story probably started around 2003.

Sramana Mitra: What happens next in the story?

Taylor Tyng: We got to a point where we had a lot of legacy issues. We were trying to move from a web  design agency-based world into a product-based world. There were a few things that became turning points within our organization. Number one was, we were early in the game, so there were no commercially sound or viable frameworks for building the technology. We were building all our platforms ourselves so we needed to make some quintessential decisions of how we wanted to shape the future of Wiredrive. >>>

Building a Cutting-Edge Telecollaboration Company: John Underkoffler, CEO of Oblong Industries (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a little bit about the commercial. How much did these three major accounts pay you to do their projects?

John Underkoffler: I will probably decline to give actual numerical figures in this context. This was more than enough to keep us going as a young startup.

Sramana Mitra: This was your seed financing, right? I imagine multi-hundred thousand, if not, millions kind of deals.

John Underkoffler: In that range. No one likes to admit that luck is actually part of success, but it is.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a huge part of success.

John Underkoffler: We were incredibly fortunate to have a number of early contracts and very enthusiastic adopters of technology who let us bootstrap >>>