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Building to $10 Million in EdTech: Panopto CTO Eric Burns (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: That’s not necessarily the only kind of companies that VCs back. VCs also back enterprise software that delivers that kind of growth. In fact, I would say the IT industry’s bread and butter success have been from enterprise software – not from consumer software.

Eric Burns: I guess the thing that may have stood out to some of these VCs is that our renewal rate was extremely high at 93%. When you have a SaaS business and you’re getting that revenue again every year and you devote the new spillover to new customer acquisition, you have a nice virtuous cycle.

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Bootstrapping a Global Software Product Company Using Services From Denmark: Sitecore CEO Michael Seifert (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

European software companies seldom reach global scale. Sitecore has not only reached global scale, but is competing with Oracle, Adobe, IBM, and Salesforce.com. Read how they have navigated the market.

Sramana: Michael, where are you from? What is the background to your story?

Michael Seifert: I was born in the Copenhagen area where I lived until first grade. I then moved to a little island in Denmark with a population of about fifty thousand people. I lived there with my mother and her brothers through high school. My father moved to the US when I was 8 or 9. I spent my summer vacations in the Bay area with my father. My first flight to the US was at age 11.

Sramana: Your father moved to the Bay area, so I am assuming that is where you got your early exposure to this culture?

Michael Seifert: Yes. He started a company called SunFlex. I enjoyed going to work with him and that is where I was exposed to my first computer. >>>

Building to $10 Million in EdTech: Panopto CTO Eric Burns (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of other vendors that you compete with, whom do you see in deals?

Eric Burns: Initially, we were quite afraid of what seemed like the incumbent player in the lecture capture market in the higher education, which is a company called Tegrity. I think it’s safe to say that we badly disrupted their market. We came in with what we believed as a superior technology, a better workflow and data model, and particularly support organization. We went after their core business, which was software-based lecture capture using web cams and cameras. Over the first couple of years, it was very much trench warfare, trying to win deals, and flying places for presentations. >>>

A Serial Entrepreneur Who Understands ‘Work’: WorkMarket CEO Jeff Leventhal (Part 7)

Sramana: So you built WorkMarket to help freelancers?

Jeff Leventhal: WorkMarket is a solution that allows people to manage freelance at scale. If your company is spending money on a thousand freelancers a day because your company has committed millions to that strategy, WorkMarket is a solution that will allow you to find people and verify who they are before you engage them. You can then manage the work they are doing and pay them for that work.

Sramana: Are you using your previous experience of telesales?

Jeff Leventhal: I am using my teambuilding experience. I hired an amazing VP of Sales a year ago and he is executing on that strategy. Our target clients spend at least $1 million a year on freelancers. We have 350 clients who use WorkMarket at that scale today. >>>

Building to $10 Million in EdTech: Panopto CTO Eric Burns (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So roughly speaking, it is end of 2007. How much venture capital did you raise at that point and how long did it take you to get the first product out of the door?

Eric Burns: We had an extreme advantage here, which is that we have the opportunity to research that market to understand what classroom capture required under the CMU umbrella for several years.

Sramana Mitra: You did all the research and validation work before the company was founded. It was all happening on a different clock – not on the venture clock.

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A Serial Entrepreneur Who Understands ‘Work’: WorkMarket CEO Jeff Leventhal (Part 6)

Sramana: In 2005, you raised money for OnForce. What did you use that money for?

Jeff Leventhal: I invested in the team. I believe value creation for a business depends on the idea, team, product, first date of sale, cash flow break even, and exit. Those are the most important moments for an entrepreneur in building a business. I put team ahead of product. I viewed this as an opportunity to invest in the team and we did bring in an unbelievable amount of talent. I focused on operations, sales, and engineering.

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Building to $10 Million in EdTech: Panopto CTO Eric Burns (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Are you assuming that there are three parallel streams being picked up? Where is the mixing happening? If you say there’s no post-production, is the technology determining how to do the mixing or which stream to use in the edited version or are you showing all three screens in different windows?

Eric Burns: It’s a bit of both. One of the things that we tried to do is infer as much as we can about the content that should be shown based on the instructor’s behavior. For example, if you’re presenting PowerPoint and you begin capturing your screen, we’re going to automatically switch and show you the screen even if the slide is still up. >>>

A Serial Entrepreneur Who Understands ‘Work’: WorkMarket CEO Jeff Leventhal (Part 5)

Sramana: How did you handle the feedback once you realized the services groups were the ones who had a need for your product?

Jeff Leventhal: We did a product iteration to configure the product more in line with client needs. That company became a $100 million dollar company within a few years.

Sramana: Was that $100 million in transaction value? Did you take an eLance or oDesk approach with the marketplace? >>>