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Bootstrapping from London to $10 Million: Alexandre Wentzo, CEO of Casewise (Part 1)

Alex tells the story of a bootstrapped company from London that has gone all the way to $10 million in just over 10 years and is now looking to scale further, perhaps with outside capital.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Tell us where you’re from, where you were born, raised, and in what kind of background.

Alexandre Wentzo: I was born outside of Paris in a little suburb. I come from a low social background. I would say that when I was around 13 years old, I started to set up my business. I used to check out every shop around my place. I started to offer brochures and create any marketing collaterals they needed and offered the complete package, from the design to the printing.

Sramana Mitra: Where was this? >>>

Bootstrapping Lessons: FairWarning CEO Kurt Long (Part 1)

Kurt has tried different permutations and combinations of bootstrapping, several of them successfully. Listen to his perspective on each of those.

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

Kurt Long: I was raised in Clearwater, Florida. I grew up in Florida at a very special time where we enjoyed being outside and in the waters. As I grew up, I watched the Apollo missions and other NASA-based missions take off from the Kennedy Space Center, which is on the other coast but you could still see the launches. From a very early age, those made an impression on me that I wanted to participate in innovation and exploration. That’s something that has stayed with me through my whole career. As I went through high school and college, I held on to the dream and even wrote letters to Kennedy Space Center to ask about the Space Center and how it worked. >>>

Concept Financing from Andreessen Horowitz: Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What are the nuggets of what you were going to do differently and how you were going to do them differently?

Andrew Rubin: Very simply put, our industry has been dominated by hardware- and network-based solutions for over 20 years. It doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. It’s just that it was the singular approach. Our world, which is the infrastructure and the applications that our customers run their business on, has changed so dramatically that in a lot of ways it felt like security has been left behind. For us, the very first conclusion we made was we needed to build a security platform in software – not in hardware – and not reliant on the network or in other words, not following the same model and motion of everything else that our customers are already doing. >>>

Concept Financing from Andreessen Horowitz: Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you started to get this thing off the ground, anecdotally and structurally, what were the next steps?

Andrew Rubin: PJ and I probably first had to figure out whether or not we like each other enough to spend more time together. I know that sounds silly now in hindsight, but when you meet somebody for the first time, you literally consider tethering the most important investment of your life to somebody else. You want to make sure you like the person. >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtualization Services Company: Chris Grandi, CEO of Abacus Group (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How has your revenue ramped from the 2007 time frame to 2015? Where are you now?

Chris Grandi: We’re growing over 50% per year. In year one, we started our revenue with less than a million dollars. You grow a 100% when your revenue is smaller. Our revenue is significantly bigger now but we’re still growing at more than 50%.  I actually don’t think that we can grow this company at greater than 50% because of the service levels that we have to provide. I will be very pleased if we continue to grow at 50%.

Sramana Mitra: You’re still doing it as a self-financed business? >>>

Concept Financing from Andreessen Horowitz: Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do in the Valley?

Andrew Rubin: In every sense of the word, people talk about luck, timing, and fate being not everything, but an important part of the story.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a very big thing.

Andrew Rubin: It’s an incredibly important part of the story in my case. While I was at Cymtec, I was coming out to California for conferences and to visit colleagues. On one of those trips before I moved out here, I was introduced to PJ Kirner who is the co-founder and CTO of Illumio. We were introduced by a mutual colleague who thought that we might enjoy talking about security and talking about views of the world that he believed we shared in common. PJ and I got together and had lunch. That started a conversation that, in a lot of ways, lasted a year and a half and led to the formation of Illumio. >>>

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Process: Todd Dunlop, CEO of RingPartner (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You seem to be enjoying the process of starting something, figuring a niche, and getting it to a certain amount of revenue. The first one you scaled to $50 million in revenue, which was a substantial amount of revenue. It sounds like you like to figure it out and then sell the company. Is that accurate?

Todd Dunlop: That definitely has been my MO to this point. That challenge of the problem solving is something I enjoy and excel at. Ultimately, the real fun for me is cracking the business model.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Presumably you’re going to sell this one not too far from now because you’ve already figured out the business model. >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtualization Services Company: Chris Grandi, CEO of Abacus Group (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is it about the hedge fund space in terms of work flows or virtualization? What specifically is different in that space versus other verticals?

Chris Grandi: There are really two things that make the hedge fund space different. One is the level of service. Because of what hedge fund managers do and how active they trade, everything has to work all the time. We all know that in technology, that’s not necessarily feasible, but the service level demand of giving them the best technology and the best service around that technology is higher than in any other industry I’ve ever been a part of. Correspondingly, because they’re hedge funds, their economic model is great. Their willingness to pay is higher. From the standpoint of just service levels, it’s very unique to hedge funds. If trading systems go down for 20 seconds, they could lose millions of dollars. You really have to prioritize building not only enterprise class technology, but also the various other redundancies. >>>