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Building A Profitable, Steady Growth Subscription Business: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 3)

David Barrett: Since they thought they were approving something else, they went along with it. In the first year of getting through that barrier, there were many false starts. It was a very depressing and difficult time. The most important piece of advice I would give anybody while going through this difficult time where you’re trying to come up with ideas is don’t tell anybody. The only person who knew what I was doing was my wife. No one in my circle knew anything about the prepaid debit card space, banks, or any of the stuff that I was working on. How could they be helpful? When you ask people who don’t have the ability to help to give it their best shot, they do a bad job. Most times, despite their best intentions, they just come off demoralizing. I’ve concluded that people can’t be helpful if they don’t have the capability to. >>>

Unicorn in the Making: Veeam CEO Ratmir Timashev (Part 7)

Sramana: You have a unique situation in a founder-financed company. Where do you see things going in the future? Are you going to take a traditional route and look for an exit?

Ratmir Timashev: Our current vision is to continue growing as a private company. We don’t need venture capital funds to keep growing. We are almost at $500 million in revenue and we have publicly stated that we want to do $1 billion by 2018. We are not applying for an IPO and we are not actively looking to sell the company. >>>

Building A Profitable, Steady Growth Subscription Business: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You joined that company in what capacity?

David Barrett: Titles in startups are pretty meaningless, but I was the technology guy. I guess you could call me Head of Engineering or CTO. Travis wasn’t the programmer. I started off doing everything, and then I hired a team under me to help me out.

Sramana Mitra: In 2009, when Akamai acquired Red Swoosh, did you have to go to work for Akamai for several years? >>>

Unicorn in the Making: Veeam CEO Ratmir Timashev (Part 6)

Sramana: When you founded Veeam and entered this market, there were all sorts of different players in different segments of the market. You were able to create a differentiated position for Veeam. What was the process of understanding and analyzing the market that allowed you to create your positioning?

Ratmir Timashev: Part of that insight is seen in how we refer to the market. The old market is data backup and recovery. We call the new market availability. What I saw was a trend of businesses being “always on”. Businesses created a new market where recovery and data loss needed to be dealt with in minutes. The old market was trying to address those problems, but it was obvious that it really needed a new market.

When we entered the market in 2007 and 2008, we started with our core customers who are VMWare administrators. We did not phrase our technology as availability at that time. We termed it backup and we did it only for virtual machines. We were specifically built for VMWare virtualization. >>>

Building A Profitable, Steady Growth Subscription Business: Expensify CEO David Barrett (Part 1)

VCs in Silicon Valley want financial levers that allow you to grow with a hockey-stick curve. Expensify doesn’t have that. In my opinion, however, they have built an excellent, profitable, steady growth subscription business that has an attractive viral characteristic. The business, at some point, may accelerate naturally, but as David notes, the levers are not financial. Very interesting case study.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with your personal background. Where were you born and raised? Tell us a little bit about your childhood.

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Unicorn in the Making: Veeam CEO Ratmir Timashev (Part 5)

Sramana: How has the change in industry tolerance and culture affected your marketplace?

Ratmir Timashev: These changes in business requirements have made the legacy solutions by Symantec and IBM less effective. Access to data should be almost continuous. You can only tolerate a few minutes of downtime and data loss should also be minimal.

Everybody needs access to data at any time, from any device, and anywhere that person is at. That is why most companies over the past five years have started projects that change their data center. They are modernizing their data centers to meet these requirements by leveraging server virtualization, network virtualization, and storage virtualization. >>>

Unicorn in the Making: Veeam CEO Ratmir Timashev (Part 4)

Sramana: What did you do when you left Quest?

Ratmir Timashev: We left in 2005 and for the next year, we took our time to look around and find the next big idea. We saw that virtualization was the new big trend. I have some good friends in the venture capital community who told me that virtualization was the big new thing.

We decided to do something similar to what we had done for Windows NT but for the VM world. We wanted to create different tools that VM administrators would need to do their day-to-day jobs. In mid-2006, we started creating different tools that involved things like monitoring, administration management, and finally a backup tool that we released in 2008.

The backup tool has been the most successful tool that we built. We ended up getting rid of most of our other products and keeping only our backup tool product. We still have a couple of management products, but the backup product creates 95% of our revenue. Our primary focus is backup data protection and a new product category that we call availability. >>>

Unicorn in the Making: Veeam CEO Ratmir Timashev (Part 3)

Sramana: How far did you take the e-commerce business?

Ratmir Timashev: The good thing is that we decided to build our online store on the Microsoft Windows NT platform, which was a business operating system and the first stable server. It became Windows 2000 and is now known as Windows Server 2012.

My partner became a top expert on Windows NT during the process of building that store. He began posting a lot of advice on forums and news groups. He wrote a couple of tools to manage Windows NT websites and Windows NT networks. He started selling these tools on his personal website for $20 in late 1996. Immediately, those two product sales exceeded our profits from the website. That led us to focus our time and effort on the software instead of on the computer parts commerce site. >>>