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Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about what happened with that money? What were the Series B milestones? What were you able to accomplish? How did the product come together?

Jonathan Ellis: When we were pitching Series B, we had the blueprint of what we wanted to build for DataStax Enterprise. We knew that we wanted to deliver analytics on top of Cassandra and then search came later on. During the Series A, we didn’t know what we were going to build, but we were selling a vision and not an actual product. The goal of Series B was to actually build that and we were already working on that. DataStax Enterprise 1.0 came out in October of 2011, we added search capabilities for 2.0 and then security for 3.0.
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Bootstrapping with Services in India: Srishtisoft CEO Ajay Sharma (Part 1)

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

Bootstrapping with service, then building two products, then splitting up the company into two, and finally, scaling a sizable product company – not the kind of stories we hear often from Indian entrepreneurs. This story is a rare window into the journey of a group of entrepreneurs who have achieved amazing feats.

Sramana: Let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where are you from and what kind of family do you come from?

Ajay Sharma: I was brought up in a village in Bihar. My father was a college professor in a rural college. It was actually rather common at that time for professors to pass through rural areas at some point of their career to help bolster those smaller, rural colleges. I attended rural schools until the tenth class. I then moved to another small, sleepy agricultural town for the eleventh and twelfth classes. >>>

Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about the business model from that time? What were you charging? What were the deal sizes and so forth?

Jonathan Ellis: When we were first starting the company, we had a potential $80,000 deal. I told Matt, “You know if we can get a few deals like this, we might not have to raise funding.” That was kind of naïve for someone who has not done it before.

Sramana Mitra: Were you able to get the deal?
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Building a Retail Business in India: Manish Sharma, CEO of Printo (Part 7)

Sramana: What was your next step? Was your first store a proof of concept to raise more money?

Manish Sharma: I had enough money to do something else, but not enough for an entirely new shop. I decided to put up a smaller shop inside a larger store. I clearly identified the demand and need and that shop was very successful. That second shop gave me a huge amount of flexibility in Bangalore.

Sramana: What did you do after you had your second successful shop?

Manish Sharma: At that point, I knew I had to raise money and scale the store. It took me about a year and a half to open the second store after I had opened the first store. I started working on the business plan in March of 2005. I finalized my business plan in about 6 months. Within about a year and a half of starting the business plan, I raised my first seed money. >>>

Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s come back to the pitch to Lightspeed based on which you raised your Series A. How did you evolve from there? How did you build the business?

Matt Pfeil: We built out an engineering team for both the core open source project as well as continued to evolve OpsCenter. For practical purposes, it felt like that was one of the goals of the money. The OpsCenter was our first company-owned product as opposed to completely open source.

It was the management software for Cassandra and we built out a team for it. We continued standard support offerings and then started to hire full-time support engineers as opposed to engineers who were doubling duty. It was really good, based on customers signing up for those offerings. We had more revenue than anticipated and ended up hiring more people than we originally planned to. Our original plan was to hire 6 people in 6 months but within a year, we had about 20 people working for the company. We also hired two sales people.

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Building a Retail Business in India: Manish Sharma, CEO of Printo (Part 6)

Sramana: Did you fund the business with just friends and family?

Manish Sharma: I did have two angel investors when I started Printo. I met them at conferences and gave them a basic elevator pitch. I was looking to raise 2 crore rupees but ended up raising 1.4 crore rupees. I did not raise a lot of money but it was enough to get the business started.

Sramana: What were you able to accomplish with that first bit of money?

Manish Sharma: The most important aspect was to get a shop setup. We needed to have a place for customers to come and place print jobs which would allow us to make money. >>>

Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Had you already moved to Silicon Valley before raising the money? This is another key question that a lot of entrepreneurs are wrestling with and making decisions on.

Jonathan Ellis: Yes. It actually wasn’t an explicit condition of the funding and we actually took another 3 months or so before moving the headquarters. They suggested it and we recognized the value of having our sales and marketing presence particularly in the Bay Area. When we were starting out, probably 80% of our customers for that first 6 months were Bay Area companies. That area is more used to taking a little bit of a risk on a new technology in the hopes of getting a big pay-off in terms of solving the scalability and performance problem. So Matt moved out as CEO and I stayed in Texas and continued building an engineering team out here which had a number of cost benefits.

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Building a Retail Business in India: Manish Sharma, CEO of Printo (Part 5)

Sramana: What happened to that business?

Manish Sharma: We were caught in the crash. Not a lot of people remember how fast that happened, but I definitely do! The company did not go anywhere.

Sramana: What did you do after the dot com crash?

Manish Sharma: We had 40 people in India at that point who were working for the company. After the crash, I explored selling the product to media companies in India. We were not able to sell it. My credit cards were maxed out and I went into debt to pay salaries and keep the team afloat. We had a fantastic team and we personally helped placing each and every one of those people in new jobs. Some of them got jobs in the U.S. It was important to me that we took care of the team. >>>