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Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 1)

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

Three years of web analytics consulting led Ali and his co-founder to identify a core customer need around which he is now building a high-growth, venture-funded company.

Sramana Mitra: Ali, let’s start with your own personal journey. Where were you born and raised? What kind of story leads up to Tealium?

Ali Behnam: I was born in Iran. Our family migrated outside Iran after the revolution. We actually ended up finding ourselves in France, which is where I got my high school degree. Later on, I came to San Diego for my college education at UC San Diego. I just fell in love with San Diego. Following my graduation, I decided that San Diego is where I want to spend the rest of my life.

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Todd Hitchcock, COO of Pearson Embanet (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Any particular discipline or is it across the board?

Todd Hitchcock: It’s funny you should ask that one. How we determine whether or not to partner with an institution is not like a traditional sale where we go and sell our products to someone. We’re actually very strategic in how we engage with our partners. The process usually starts when a school comes to us or we go to a school that wants to put a certain degree program online. Before we engage in deep discussions with them, we do a market assessment. Your question is important because we look at a degree program and we have a number of criteria to determine whether or not that’s a good degree program to put online. >>>

Building a Pre-IPO Company Over 10 Years: Centrify CEO Tom Kemp (Part 5)

Sramana: You have obviously been in business for a while and have built a company based on multiple products. What is the process to figure out product positioning?

Tom Kemp: You obviously have to listen to your customers. Often, customers have their heads down and while you may make them happier, they are not thinking strategically. You want to look at what competition is doing and figure out if there are reasons you are losing deals from a technology perspective. The other thing is that you have to know where the industry is going. Try to pass the puck where the player is going to be as opposed to where the player is at right now. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Todd Hitchcock, COO of Pearson Embanet (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Where does Embanet fit into this picture?

Todd Hitchcock: I should build on one other thing before I jump in to answer that question.  Our goal as a company – it’s emblematic of Pearson Embanet – is to ensure that every single product and service that we create is founded on efficacy. Our goal by 2018 is to ensure that every single product and service has measurable outcomes so that we can measure those outcomes and ensure that we’re increasing student performance.

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Building a Pre-IPO Company Over 10 Years: Centrify CEO Tom Kemp (Part 4)

Sramana: At that time, what were you proposing with your elevator pitch?

Tom Kemp: At a high level, it is what we are doing now. The general idea is that as the world gets more heterogeneous from an IT perspective, it introduces complexity with multiple logins and difficulty for IT to control access. If you think back 10 years ago, heterogeneity was happening in the data center with Linux coming in and replacing Unix or Windows. We wanted Centrify to come in and make that environment look, feel, and smell like its homogenous from the perspective of authentication, authorization, and policy. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Todd Hitchcock, COO of Pearson Embanet (Part 1)

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

The Higher Education industry is going through massive adoption of online education. This conversation highlights the trends, as well as areas where Pearson is looking for partners.

Sramana Mitra: Todd, let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the Pearson Embanet unit so that we have some context set for the conversation.

Todd Hitchcock: Thank you very much for taking the time to meet with us today. I’m Todd Hitchcock and I currently manage our managed-program business at Pearson Embanet. I’ve been in education since 1990. I’ve been an educator myself and have run online programs. I came to Pearson just over six years ago to essentially build out our online learning strategy. Prior to managing our Pearson Embanet business, I was responsible for our US Higher Education online learning strategy and our content and courseware.  >>>

Building a Pre-IPO Company Over 10 Years: Centrify CEO Tom Kemp (Part 3)

Sramana: There are a lot of companies today that are bootstrapped with very small amounts of capital. Some of them raise capital later and others don’t. The big change is that you can’t go public with a $20 million company anymore.

Tom Kemp: No, you can’t. You have to be a lot bigger now. When you look at how competitive things are, it makes it difficult to bootstrap all the way although anything can be done. You can bootstrap to the point of shipping a product and perhaps up to version two. Most people are finding that if you want to reach $100 million in sales, then you have to raise capital. It’s a question of when, not if.

Sramana: Yes and now. We have lots of case studies in our program that illustrate how companies have hit $200 million in revenue without any outside capital. Zoho is a perfect example. Your point is well taken, a lot of companies do raise capital. We are fine with companies raising capital later after they have bootstrapped to get a better valuation. I think those are good best practices in terms of building ownership value. >>>

Finding a Viable Monetization Model: wefi CEO Zur Feldman (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: It was hard, but you managed to raise the round. Was it based on the fact that you had a strong team that the investors thought you could figure out how to monetize this user base?

Zur Feldman: I think it was a combination. It was a very determined team. It was clear that the problem that we’re solving is a big problem and it’s not going to go away. As time went by, the problem became very evident. It’s not just a prediction that we’re going to have a problem. It’s actually happening. There was a huge problem in different metro areas, specifically in Manhattan. Part of it was that the market started to give signals that it is going to be an issue and it is going to require innovation and thinking out of the box. Also, we managed to really switch the business and look at this from a different point of view. >>>