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Unicorn in the Making: Veeam CEO Ratmir Timashev (Part 2)

Sramana: What year did you leave school to start your first business?

Ratmir Timashev: I left in 1995.

Sramana: In 1995 the Internet was starting to take off. What kind of business did you start?

Ratmir Timashev: It was the early days of the Internet. I started that business with Andrei Baronov who has been a business partner for several businesses. >>>

Unicorn in the Making: Veeam CEO Ratmir Timashev (Part 1)

You have read some of the Unicorn Series pieces already: Tableau, FireEye, RightNow, Palo Alto Networks and several others. Here’s a company that gets little coverage but is performing at Unicorn levels.

Sramana: Ratmir, let’s start our discussion by reviewing your background. Where are you from? What are the roots of your entrepreneurial journey?

Ratmir Timashev: I was born in Russia in 1966 in the mountains between the European and Asian region of Russia. I studied physics in Moscow and I attended the top science school in Russia. I was working on my PhD when perestroika came into being. Science was very prestigious under the Soviet Union and when perestroika happened, all that changed. Government funding suddenly stopped. The economy collapsed and science did not make sense. A lot of my friends who were studying science went to work in other areas. >>>

Building a Global Technology Company from Colombia: Ricardo Villadiego, CEO of Easy Solutions (Part 7)

Sramana: So one of the key value points is that you can provide a platform solution as opposed to various point solutions. Do you offer incremental access to the platform?

Ricardo Villadiego: Clients can start with one product and have the aspiration to implement the whole platform. The company was built around the crossover concept. We want to get into a deal with one piece of our platform and then we can work to gain the trust of the account so that they will want to use the entire platform. >>>

Building a Global Technology Company from Colombia: Ricardo Villadiego, CEO of Easy Solutions (Part 6)

Sramana: What did you do after you raised the $11 million round of funding?

Ricardo Villadiego: We literally took the company global. We added a lot of resources in the US to cover it coast to coast. We added sales offices all over the country as well as an innovation center in Atlanta where we added some product managers. Our CTO and VP of Sales also operates out of the Atlanta office. We maintained the corporate headquarters in Miami, which lets me stay close to our research and development center in Bogota while being close to the US operations.

Sramana: How many people do you have in Bogota? >>>

Building a Global Technology Company from Colombia: Ricardo Villadiego, CEO of Easy Solutions (Part 5)

Sramana: What did you do with the money that you raised in your initial round?

Ricardo Villadiego: After I closed our first round in April 2010 with Progressive Capital based in Medellin, Columbia, we focused on growth in Latin America. By the end of 2010, Gartner approached us because we had picked up so many large clients throughout South America. They validated our approach and included us in their magic quadrant for web fraud prevention. That has led to us getting a lot of recognition and traction in the US.

Sramana: How many customers did you have in Latin America by the time Gartner approached you?

Ricardo Villadiego: We had around 40 clients. Almost all of them were in the financial services industry and the rest were telecoms.

Sramana: What revenue levels were you able to achieve?

Ricardo Villadiego: By the end of 2010, we were doing about $1.2 million in revenue. >>>

Building a Global Technology Company from Colombia: Ricardo Villadiego, CEO of Easy Solutions (Part 4)

Sramana: How many customers were involved in the early R&D and validation stage?

Ricardo Villadiego: I could count the number of people on one hand. There were a maximum of 5.

Sramana: That is fantastic. For an entrepreneur to get 3 to 5 solid enterprise customers for a complex system like this early on is invaluable. I find it even more fascinating that you did that in Latin America based out of Columbia. We don’t see a lot of technology companies being built in Latin America. >>>

Building a Global Technology Company from Colombia: Ricardo Villadiego, CEO of Easy Solutions (Part 3)

Sramana: You said that you launched the company in 2006 but you had to stay with IBM for a while, so you were not able to work on the company full-time until 2009. What happened between 2006 and 2009?

Ricardo Villadiego: We were searching through different technical approaches to tackle the problem.

Sramana: So you were doing R&D work to evaluate different potential solutions while you were working for IBM?

Ricardo Villadiego: Yes, that is correct.

Sramana: During that three year period, was anyone else involved?

Ricardo Villadiego: I was the founder with my best friend from the university and my wife. During those three years, we added our Vice President of R&D. He was the one who built the prototypes. Those prototypes turned into our comprehensive solution several years later. >>>

Building a Global Technology Company from Colombia: Ricardo Villadiego, CEO of Easy Solutions (Part 2)

Sramana: What was the founding concept for Easy Solutions?

Ricardo Villadiego: I created Easy Solutions with my wife and my best friend from my university. When we created the company, our vision was to be the global leader in electronic fraud prevention.

Sramana: Did you do this from Bogota, Columbia?

Ricardo Villadiego: Yes, that is where I founded the company. It was hard putting those words in the vision of the company at the time since it was in Bogota and because there was a lot of bad publicity about the country. The reality was that the country was facing a lot of problems with narcotics traffic and rebels. Some of those problems still remain. When we set the vision of the company, we knew that we would have to work hard to achieve that vision.

A lot of what I had learned through my experience at Unisys and ISS was when the companies had revenue of less than $10 million. The knowledge that I gained at Unisys and ISS gave me the background that I needed to make Easy Solutions a global company.

I began by hiring talented developers in the Bogota area to fulfill that vision. When we decided to be a global leader in electronic fraud prevention, we also decided to tackle the problem in a different way. We wanted to have a fresh approach that was unique to the way the legacy companies tried to address the problem.

Traditionally in fraud, the technology would recognize the fraudulent activity when there was a transaction involved. When we started the company we realized that this was not the beginning of the problem; it was the end of the problem. When a problem is actually occurring, it means that the bad guys were able to complete the entire cycle of fraud. They were able to plan, launch, and convert with a fraudulent transaction.

With the knowledge of how fraud occurs, we built something called the Total Fraud Protection Platform. The platform offers a way to tackle fraud in a holistic manner from beginning to the end. That concept has started to resonate in the market. We started selling in Latin America and then as we got more and more clients in Latin America, some of the industry analysts like Gartner and Forester approached us to understand why some of their biggest clients in South America were switching from their existing fraud prevention solutions to our platforms.