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Achieving Product-Market Fit That Allows You to Build Billion Dollar Unicorns: Gaurav Dhillon, Founder of Informatica and SnapLogic (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: 156 customer calls that you made gave you real conversations about real customer problems. Even though you didn’t sell what you went out to sell, this was a great opportunity to immerse yourself in customers and learn what they were really looking for.

Gaurav Dhillon: This is AB testing to the power of a million.

Sramana Mitra: By the way, this is a process that we use for all our customer validation work. Many of our entrepreneurs who have been part of the Entrepreneur Journeys case study series have shared this process of immersion.

Gaurav Dhillon: In the complex software, hardware, and networking business, this is a tried and tested method. I was a graduate student in Computer Science. If I’d done an MBA, I would have learned this. It’s a great lesson because that is what we then refined and built. We said, “Everybody’s going to need to move the data. Everybody’s going to need to connect the mainframe to the client server. Then they’re going to want to >>>

Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to 2010 when you were launching Boticca. Tell me more about how you got this off the ground. What did you launch with? What was the financing around it?

Kiyan Foroughi: I actually launched an alpha version of the website on my own. I’m not a technical guy so I had to work with an agency to develop a very basic alpha version of the website. We got it out there. There was about 30 designers on the platform at launch. Now we have close to 350 brands and designers. That was all out of my own funding. Once I got it out there and saw that it was starting to demonstrate some traction, albeit at a small scale, I recruited a co-founder. We both put money into the business to fund some early hires. The first outside investment that we did was a convertible note round. It was a fairly small round. It was around £250,000.

Sramana Mitra: The £250,000 was aside from you and your co-founder?
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Achieving Product-Market Fit That Allows You to Build Billion Dollar Unicorns: Gaurav Dhillon, Founder of Informatica and SnapLogic (Part 3)

Gaurav Dhillon: Let me take you through that journey. I still remember how excited we were. Once we got the grant, we built the research into the object databases. The truth is they never got anywhere. Then we thought, “Why don’t we build technology to help people downsize?” This is 1995 and you’re running a COBOL program on a mainframe. It’s pretty clear that the 2000 bug is coming. Wouldn’t you want to get this COBOL program off the mainframe into Oracle and Sun?

By the way, we would consult by day and work by night. When you’re in your 20s, you’re just unbreakable. The energy and enthusiasm in doing these things was pretty epic. We were seven to eight people at this point. We actually went out and built a product that would take your COBOL >>>

Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do to address that issue?

Kiyan Foroughi: Before I jump into that, there’s one thing I want to add. I told you about my professional background. In terms of my family heritage, I come from a background of jewelry. I’m the fourth generation in the luxury industry on my mother’s side. I’m the third generation when it comes to jewelry. My grandfather was a gemologist. He was an agent for a bunch of luxury brands in Iran before the revolution. I grew up around jewelry specifically. It’s an area I know really well. I spent summers in my grandfather’s workshop learning about the different properties of stones and stone-setting techniques. When I came across this designer, it was very much a perfect marriage between my professional background and my personal heritage.

To answer your question, I went back immediately after this encounter and started doing research. I said to myself, “Surely, there has to be a destination in the web that allows upcoming designers and brands of fashion accessories to sell their products to customers all over the >>>

Achieving Product-Market Fit That Allows You to Build Billion Dollar Unicorns: Gaurav Dhillon, Founder of Informatica and SnapLogic (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Prior to Informatica, your work experience was with Unisys?

Gaurav Dhillon: That’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: Did you come up with the concept for Informatica while you were at Unisys?

Gaurav Dhillon: We wanted to break up into our own along this whole point server downsizing process. Believe it or not, the co-founders applied to the NIH for a grant of $75,000 to do research into how we could use object databases to do medical imaging. There is this program called Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) coordinated by Small Business Administration. I certainly feel that the SBIR program is an enlightened program because it’s meant to create young businesses. You have to apply as permanent residents. It’s sort of the granddaddy of incubators in some way. If you are able to go out and pursue that project, it’s yours. The thinking is you will possibly create a company and you will, possibly, create a job. We did. >>>

Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca (Part 1)

I continue to be interested in how the fashion industry is slowly and surely finding innovative ways to leverage the Internet. Kiyan Foroughi has created a marketplace for fashion accessories that is scaling nicely and helping new designers find a customer base.

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?

Kiyan Foroughi: I’m French-Iranian. I was born in Paris. My parents were immigrants from Iran. I grew up a little bit all over the place. I grew up in France, but I also spent a big part of my childhood in Dubai. We went out there because my father was an architect and he had >>>

Achieving Product-Market Fit That Allows You to Build Billion Dollar Unicorns: Gaurav Dhillon, Founder of Informatica and SnapLogic (Part 1)

Gaurav Dhillon founded Informatica, took it public, and ran it for 12 years before handing the reins over to Sohaib Abbasi, its current CEO. Five years ago, he founded SnapLogic, a company that has raised almost $60 million in venture capital and has tripled in revenue last year. Gaurav knows a thing or two about how to identify an opportunity, validate or invalidate it, and craft a product-market fit that has significant scaling potential in the world of enterprise software. Read Gaurav’s Entrepreneurial Journey.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? Where did you grow up? What’s the backstory of your entrepreneurial journey?

Gaurav Dhillon: I was born in northern India. I grew up in an industrial town, which is well-known as a light engineering producer.  >>>

Disinfecting Hospitals, Impacting Healthcare: Morris Miller, CEO of Xenex (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: They allowed you to publish the results as well?

Morris Miller: They actually published it in the journal of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology. It’s called ICHE. It was very well received and passed peer review. In March of 2011, when we really could begin selling in earnest, we had our prototypes. We sold our prototype devices. The market wanted them. I say it’s a prototype but it wasn’t really a prototype. Compared to what we have now, it looks like a prototype. It was at that point that we started developing our current germ-zapping robot. We launched that into the market in late 2012.

Interestingly, when we began selling these robots, hospitals would ask us, “What do you think we can expect in terms of reduction in infections?” We would say, “We really don’t know. Maybe 5% to 10%.” In our minds, maybe we could prevent 200,000 infections a year. We might be able to save 10,000 lives. Everybody would look at us and say, “That would be amazing.” >>>