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Bootstrapping Lessons: FairWarning CEO Kurt Long (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How long did Open Network go on?

Kurt Long: Almost 10 years.

Sramana Mitra: What happened then?

Kurt Long: It was acquired by BMC.

Sramana Mitra: What year was that acquisition?

Kurt Long: I think it was 2004 or 2005.

Sramana Mitra: You did not raise outside capital?
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Bootstrapping from London to $10 Million: Alexandre Wentzo, CEO of Casewise (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How do you charge? What’s the business model?

Alexandre Wentzo: It’s per user. Roughly, we sell at an average of $250,000.

Sramana Mitra: So it’s large enterprise selling kind of business?

Alexandre Wentzo: That’s correct. Things have changed because 10 years ago, we used to sell a few licenses. It would be 5 to 10 users. Now, we have this social layer in our platform. We still have 10 to 20 that are using our product but the information is consumed thousands of users. We sell now by server license. >>>

Bootstrapping Lessons: FairWarning CEO Kurt Long (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: On this topic, I’d like to probe a little bit more. Let me give you some context. We have a very significant research and curriculum material on a methodology that you followed, which we call Bootstrapping Using Services. One of our Entrepreneur Journeys Series books actually covers this as well. Let’s double-click on this a bit. When you started doing Fortune 500 services work around security, tell us a bit more about what specifically did you do?

Kurt Long: It was actually an early version of web single sign-on for large corporations. Whether it’s an insurance company or a telecommunications company, they might have a collection of applications that they use to service their external customers. They don’t want those customers to have to sign in multiple times. They want the experience to be seamless through a portal. They want it to be seamless in terms of security model. >>>

Concept Financing from Andreessen Horowitz: Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Also, your sales cycle was already in full swing. If there are 100 customers engaged in the developing of the product, that means that as soon as the product is ready, a good percentage of those are ready to buy. If you have product–market fit, a good percentage of those are ready to buy.

Andrew Rubin: Even though we didn’t do it with the idea of pipeline in mind, it was obvious to us that some of the work that we were doing would eventually pay off after we launch the company. We ended up running in stealth mode until October 22nd of 2014. On that day, we publicly launched the company. Just to endorse what you said about not only building the feedback loop but also the customer engagement, on the day that we launched, we had referenceable customers on the record who were talking about us. One of them in particular is worth calling out. Morgan Stanley, who I’m sure you know by name, is obviously one of the very large global banks. >>>

Bootstrapping from London to $10 Million: Alexandre Wentzo, CEO of Casewise (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When you arrived, was the product already in place? Were they already selling?

Alexandre Wentzo: Yes. The product was only in English at that time. There was a need to put in place a sales team in Europe. We trained them on the product. We were a very small company. I had to translate the product and training guides. We started to work with a major business school in France to get some students from Marketing, mainly to help us improve the perception of the business. The culture difference between France and England is quite massive. One of the main competitors was a 300-people organization based in Paris.

Sramana Mitra: How did you navigate the market and sell the product in the beginning?
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Bootstrapping Lessons: FairWarning CEO Kurt Long (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about the conditions under which you started your first company. What was that company? What was going on around that led you to that and how did you get that going?

Kurt Long: I was very naive about being an entrepreneur. I was a really good software developer and had a lot of energy. I had a lot of ambition and very little knowledge. It was in 1994 when I saw the World Wide Web for the first time. Many took one look at the World Wide Web and said, “This is going to change the world profoundly.” With a great deal of naivete, I left the corporate world and started my own business. >>>

Concept Financing from Andreessen Horowitz: Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Venture capitalists and even seed investors do not fund concepts. We say this to our entrepreneurs in the program all the time. You have to get to a business. You have to get to some level of validation with your product before people are willing to write big checks.

Andrew Rubin: I think there’s a lot of truth in that. But I think we are among the few of the data points that does show that there are some exceptions to the rule. They are far and few between. What ended up happening with us was we had a lot of soak time. We spent a year. Although we hadn’t built the product and we didn’t have customers and revenues, we were in a position to be able to explain in an unbelievable level of detail, the depth of the problem, the specifics of why it existed, exactly what we wanted to build, the architecture of how we were going to build it, and exactly what it would do and how it would behave. I think three things came together for us in December 2012 when we pitched Andreessen Horowitz, which gave us a yes before we had a product. >>>

Bootstrapping from London to $10 Million: Alexandre Wentzo, CEO of Casewise (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you tell the story of how the company was founded and develop the story fully?

Alexandre Wentzo: When I joined them in the UK, they were working in Central London in a small flat. They were keen on the French market at that time because the economy was a bit better than the rest of Europe. I used to travel back and forth between London and Paris. In 2006, we built the French office. Soon, we got big names in France as our customers. I went back to England for a few years and copied the French model I’ve developed. Two years ago, I went to the US and appled the same methodology. The story would be more on leadership than entrepreneurship, I would say.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a little bit about the business of Casewise.
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