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Raising $20 Million from Angel Investors: Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele Contorer (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In 2005, you quit your job. How did you get started? What was your next step?

Lori Steele Contorer: I started looking around the world for the best technology. I’ve seen many companies throw money at technologies in the early 2000s and I feel if you don’t understand the process you’re trying to fix or improve, then you’re going to fail.

I discovered a technology in Australia and acquired that company. It was a small company at that time but they have been doing online voting since 1996. They had done government elections in 2002 and 2003. >>>

Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do you price this?

Eyal Magen: It’s a SaaS-based model, so you have to pay every year. We usually sign multi-year deals. We price it based on a combination of elements of the product that you purchase and obviously, the number of users that you anticipate.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a volume-based pricing model?

Eyal Magen: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: To summarize what you do in terms of the value proposition, if a user is shopping online on the GAP site and wants to log into the GAP site with Facebook or Twitter, they’re essentially going through your system to get authenticated and logged in. >>>

Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So in 2004, you sold to NetApp. Did you work for NetApp?

Ron Bianchini: I did.

Sramana Mitra: For how long?

Ron Bianchini: As part of the acquisition, we all had two-year golden handcuffs, but I stayed for four years.

Sramana Mitra: To work for NetApp, did you have to move to Silicon Valley? What were the terms of that acquisition? >>>

Raising $20 Million from Angel Investors: Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele Contorer (Part 2)

Lori Steele Contorer: I thought I would do it forever until I was asked to speak at a United Nations Conference where I had an interesting opportunity. The week that I was speaking at the conference in Switzerland happened to be the week that Arnold Schwarzenegger won the gubernatorial election in California. All of the best minds of technology were at this conference. They were talking about how to use emerging technologies in the early 2000s to help not just transform industries but also to help developing countries throughout the world.

Strangely, because of this election, everyone was talking about voting. They were of course talking about how Arnold Schwarzenegger was now Governor of California, which seemed odd in Switzerland. I kept thinking that the really interesting thing was all these people were doing extraordinary technological things but no one was looking at elections. No one was saying, “Why aren’t we using these advanced technologies to solve election problems.” >>>

Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I think there are clear winners. At the time that you were describing, Facebook wasn’t the clear winner by any stretch of the imagination. Once you have clear winners with massive market cloud, then those are the options that are being offered by other sites.

Eyal Magen: Right. What also happened is that obviously the user is now moving quickly between different screens – mobile, home computer, and work computer. Any service that wants to provide them with a unified experience across screens will have to ask the users to identify. These are the reasons why identity is becoming so central. We eventually became an enabler for sites to connect with a user using their identity to save the identity and user data, and most importantly, to connect to third-party systems that can leverage the user third-party data for marketing or personalization. >>>

Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That’s good. John Jarve is also an MIT grad by the way.

Ron Bianchini: I know. Have you met him?

Sramana Mitra: Yes, several times.

Ron Bianchini: He’s on my Board in my third company now.

Sramana Mitra: You raised a lot of money for Spinnaker. How long did it take you to bring the product to market and what kind of customers did you find traction in?

Ron Bianchini: We ran Spinnaker for four years from 2000 to 2004. In 2004, we sold it to Network Appliance for $300 million. >>>

Raising $20 Million from Angel Investors: Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele Contorer (Part 1)

Here’s a ‘what not to do’ lesson from Lori, except, she didn’t have any choice. A story of resilience that is now turning a corner, preparing for much bigger growth.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Lori Steele Contorer: I was born and raised in a small town in Ohio. I was raised primarily by my mother and my mother’s mother. I had a sister.  My mom’s sister was also a part of our family. I was raised in a lower middle class family that wasn’t into business or entrepreneurship at all.

Sramana Mitra: What about college? >>>

Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So this is the story of your first company. What happens next?

Ron Bianchini: I stayed at FORE for about four years. In three years’ time, we were acquired by Marconi Communications. They acquired us and I stayed there another year. In 2000, I left. Having been a professor in the past, intellectual distance between the companies was very important to me. Scalable was a networking company. A year after the acquisition, I and a couple of other FORE colleagues got together and started a company in file systems. My next company was called Spinnaker Networks and we started that in January of 2000.

Sramana Mitra: One little detail in the first company, did you raise money to do that?

Ron Bianchini: Yes. This is a really good point of fact. For my first company, we went to VCs and basically, they saw two babes in the woods or rather two professors with a really cool patent who had never developed a product or built a company. For the first company, we raised our first and only round. It was a $2 million raised on a $4 million pre. For $2 million, they got a third of the company. >>>