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Building a Sustainable, Capital-Efficient Business: Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I noticed that you said solve the problem that people were not backing up data. You can create back-up opportunities. How do you solve the problem that people were not backing up data?

Gleb Budman: The reason I say that what we were trying to do was solve that problem was because back-up solutions existed. We joked that we were 30 years too late to data backup. There was definitely no first mover advantage and it wasn’t the kind of thing where we’re like, “We should definitely do backup because no one else is.” We were not going to be first. The problem that we realized was that people still were not backing up their data. We wanted to understand a little bit deeper about that. Why were people not doing it? What could we possibly do to help? We explored a variety of different solution types. We explored making better software for people to back up to external hard drives.

We thought, “Something that would just make it easy for people to automate the process of backing up to their hard drives.” We explored the idea of backing up to existing services. We thought, “Maybe if people could just have some software that would back up their spreadsheets to Google >>>

Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What do you do?

Michael Sikorsky: I happened to be in New York. I was connected to lots of stuff around investing and crowdsourcing to venture capital. The iPhone comes out. I had that lightning bolt feeling when the Internet came out. Now, I’m a lot older. I’ve been through multiple companies. I even started investing in other people’s companies. My theory of business and my theory economics is now not completely naïve. You grow it over time. My theory was that mobile would be bigger than the Internet. It turns out that now, that’s true. I thought I wanted to attack this mobile space.

From Robots and Pencils standpoint, I wanted to do a couple of things. This was really important to me. I actually believe that if you look at pre-Robots and Pencils, every single thing that I have been doing has an investor and it has a forced exit and implied economic return. Over time, I have come to this realization that it just changed the dynamics of the firm. Rather than solving problems for our users, lots of times, we’re solving for the investor. The closer that I got to understanding investment and venture capital, the more I was like, “That’s how your business model works.” >>>

An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like around 2008, two relatively young entrepreneurs from Indiana sold the company for upwards of a couple of a million dollars and were starting another company.

Cameron Weeks: We founded this company that we operate today back in 2007 as a side project. Someone who we had worked with in the past actually owned a high rise building downtown in Indianapolis. He called and said that he was redoing the eighth floor and needed a phone system and if we could help buy a phone system for him. We were already at Purdue at that time. The story was we said, “We won’t buy you a phone system. We’ll just build one. Give us two weeks and we’ll have it done for you. We’ll come set it up.”

We retreated to my parent’s house. I was a freshman at college. We built this phone system. It was an utter disaster. The entire eighth floor is full of one to two person law firms. These are not huge firms. I quickly learned that attorneys, when their phones don’t work, are very mean people. >>>

Building a Sustainable, Capital-Efficient Business: Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year did this acquisition happen?

Gleb Budman: It happened in March 2000.

Sramana Mitra: Good timing. What happens next?

Gleb Budman: I worked there until it went out of business. It was going to get acquired by ComCast and I was on the team that was working to package the assets for sale. When they shut down fully, I left. This was in 2002. The Valley was pretty much dead. I had been working crazy hours for a few years at that point. I decided to take time off and went traveling for four months. I had a fantastic time on my travels. I was living on $5 a day. I was having a luxurious lifestyle sitting on a beach in Thailand, and traveling to New Zealand.

While I was on the beach in Thailand, I got an email from one of the people from the previous company saying, “Hey, we’re starting another company. Come back.” At this point, I was staring out at a beautiful sea with warm waters. I was certain that at $5 a day, I could pretty much retire >>>

Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I got it. How many people did you have in the company that you were essentially renting out?

Michael Sikorsky: It was very fast. It went from 0 to 65 people in nine months.

Sramana Mitra: Then you sold the company to whom?

Michael Sikorsky: To my business partner. It was almost like an accident. Again, you can almost see the pattern. I was like, “I don’t want to be at this company. I don’t know what I’m going to do. How about I try this idea?” I just wasn’t super passionate about it.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a very common idea that these various offshore firms are doing. You can put a little lipstick on that but it is not a great business.

Michael Sikorsky: No, it’s not. >>>

An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks (Part 1)

It’s always thrilling for me to encounter entrepreneurs who are succeeding in off-center places, and Fathom Voice is a great example of one from Indiana.

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?

Cameron Weeks: I was born in a very small town in Indiana, just north of Indianapolis. Its total population was just 3,000. My graduating class had around 56 people.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you study? >>>

Building a Sustainable, Capital-Efficient Business: Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman (Part 1)

I keep harping on sustainable growth, not growth at all cost. Gleb tells the story of his company, built block by block with sustainability in focus.

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

Gleb Budman: I was born in the former Soviet Union in Russia. I was there for about the first five years of my life before my parents were able to get us out, which I’m eternally grateful for. We immigrated through Austria, Italy, and landed in Pennsylvania where we spent about a year and a half trying to make ends meet before my dad got an interview out here in Silicon Valley. He came on a trip out here for the interview and looked up at the sky and said, “There’s this glowing thing in the sky and the rivers don’t catch fire. This is amazing.” We got all of our stuff packed up in a big truck. By 1981, we were in Silicon Valley and I’ve spent most of my time between San Jose and Berkeley and everything in between. >>>

Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Give me the chronology of it. You didn’t mention raising money at any of these points.

Michael Sikorsky: I raised right away as I started the company.

Sramana Mitra: In Alberta?

Michael Sikorsky: Yes, in Alberta. I presented to 11 investors when I was 22. Just to tell you a neat story there, the presentation I had given was horrible. I didn’t know that it was horrible. I realized as they asked me the questions that I didn’t have answers to any of the questions, and I didn’t have the thinking that they wanted me to have. Just their questions were enough for me to reflect.

Sramana Mitra: Why did they give you money?

Michael Sikorsky: I asked them that exact same question. We had sold the company to an American firm. Everyone was getting their checks at the end. I actually pulled aside one of the guys that I had the best relationship with and I said, “I just want to ask you. That was the worst >>>