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Building a Secondary Ticketing Business From Spain: Ander Michelena, CEO of Ticketbis (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So people were just finding you through organic Google search basically.

Ander Michelena: Yes, we were using SEM, SEO, and affiliates to get traffic. That was what it was. Before we launched in other countries, we were only based in Spain. With that million euros, we created the website and made it compatible with local companies. We follow the same strategy in those countries. In the second year, we did €5 million in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: What are some other interesting strategic moves that you made in building this company? Obviously, you’ve built a very capital efficient company and you’ve scaled it to a very significant level with a very disciplined approach. I love that. That’s our philosophy in our program. Share more of your insights and learnings on what you did right and what strategic moves you made that helped you achieve that.
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Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Coby Sella, CEO of Sansa Security (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Your primary go-to-market strategy is an OEM strategy?

Coby Sella: Yes. Our goal is to deploy as many clients as possible. Our footprint in the industry today is about a quarter of a billion devices using Sansa technology, whether it is Sansa providing platform security capabilities or Sansa delivering embedded software within the trusted environment. We already have a very nice base on which we deploy our clients. >>>

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Abraham Gutman, CEO of AG Mednet (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: My next question is from an industry point of view. What are the trends and where do you see open problems that are perhaps not in your product roadmap but are things that you are seeing just because of your deep penetration and insight of the space? Where do you see the problems that need to be solved by new entrepreneurs?

Abraham Gutman: First of all, there need to be ways to reduce or slow down the growing cost of clinical trials. That’s a very big problem. A billion dollars in 10 years is becoming unacceptable. >>>

Building a Secondary Ticketing Business From Spain: Ander Michelena, CEO of Ticketbis (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The numbers you are quoting are amazing. Even in India, you cannot get a great engineer for $25,000.

Ander Michelena: You can get very good talent at a cheaper rate. That is one of our main competitive advantages. We are almost more than 300 people in the company at this point. Most of the team is based in Spain where the salary cost is under control. We fight against some American players but their cost base is much higher. That gives us an advantage.

Sramana Mitra: What were the milestones that you accomplished with your Series A financing?

Ander Michelena: We launched the website with our money in January 2010. The money was raised in July 2009. With that first round, we obtained revenues of one million euros. The model was working quite fast and quite well actually.
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Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Coby Sella, CEO of Sansa Security (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In that case, the software that you are delivering goes as embedded systems?

Coby Sella: Sansa’s solution actually requires implementation of clients. These clients will be embedded within the SOC. We are relying on the SOC’s platform security. This could be a piece of software in a secure environment. For the sake of fast adoption, we’re actually starting with software on existing devices. The counterpart of that would be >>>

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Abraham Gutman, CEO of AG Mednet (Part 6)

Abraham Gutman: Another level of quality analysis that we do is on the meta data in the images. You know how JPEGs have some meta data. It has a little bit of GPS stuff. In a JPEG, you may have a few dozen meta tags, so to speak. In a medical image, you have several thousand meta tags. The equivalent of aperture and so forth but multiplied by a thousand. Those things are very well-defined in the imaging charter because you need consistency, step by step, as they are being sent. Otherwise, you may introduce noise into data that is already pretty fuzzy to figure out whether a drug is working. We are now able to check all of these things around these images prior to the images being sent, which reduces the number of queries by over 75% in imaging trials.

Sramana Mitra; It sounds like that’s where you’ve done a huge amount of innovation and thinking to really optimize the process of pre-sending.

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Building a Secondary Ticketing Business From Spain: Ander Michelena, CEO of Ticketbis (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s step back. What I’m trying to trace here is more of a case study of the entrepreneur’s journey. What was the first thing that you did when you launched the company? It sounds like you were able to convince investors. What kind of investors were these?

Ander Michelena: The good thing about my previous job in investment banking and my partner’s job in private wealth was that we knew quite a good number of people who had created their own companies and had considerable wealth. Once we quit, we started contacting these people that my partner had connections with. We were quite surprised because everybody was quite interested. The first round was quite easy. We didn’t raise too much. It was $400,000. That’s the first thing we started looking at.

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Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Coby Sella, CEO of Sansa Security (Part 3)

Coby Sella: Alternatively, if the management company changes within a certain set of years, this mechanism will be applicable and replace the entity with another one. The solution itself has the flexibility to rely on these devices and to delegate the provisioning technology from one entity to the next one up the chain, which is a relatively innovative concept.

Sramana Mitra: What about on the facilities side? What specifically is happening? We just recently did a story on an energy sensor and energy management and optimization IoT company. I know that space is very active. What kind of adoption are you seeing there?

Coby Sella: One interesting adoption that we see is in the use case of connectivity chip sets. >>>