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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 2)

Sramana Mitra: I am going to probe you on a couple of different points. Did you start DataStax while you were still inside of Rackspace?

Jonathan Ellis: No. We were working on Cassandra at Rackspace but we started DataStax, originally called Riptano, after leaving Rackspace.

Sramana Mitra: So, by the time you left Rackspace and started this company did you know precisely what DataStax was going to do?

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Building a Retail Business in India: Manish Sharma, CEO of Printo (Part 4)

Sramana: Where you trying to develop another company after you returned to India or did you decide to go back into services work?

Manish Sharma: I continued forward with my goal of establishing a product company. I finally came up with a product idea in the AI space which had been a passion of mine since my college days. I also wanted the company to be based out of the U.S. I was able to convince a friend of mine from school to join me as the CTO and we co-founded the company together.

Sramana: Did you move back to the US to establish the company there?

Manish Sharma: I was based in India and started doing this product company there. I would travel to the U.S. and spend 4 to 6 months of the year there. It was a lot of fun and my most passionate venture. We were building a classification and learning engine. We approached it from context search. We wanted to build a product that would allow a user to highlight the content on a webpage that was highly relevant to what they were doing and have our learning engine present them more information from other websites that was highly relevant to what that person was looking for. >>>

Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 1)

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

This is an interesting story of how an open source software company built around Cassandra was incubated by RackSpace and has grown to $5 million in revenue. Founded by engineers Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, the interview traces not only the successes of their journey but also the mistakes they made in structuring their funding rounds.

Sramana Mitra: Jonathan and Matt, let’s start with both of your backgrounds. Where you were born? Where did you grow up? How did you get together?

Jonathan Ellis: I grew up in New Jersey. I met Matt after I moved to Texas to work for Rackspace. Rackspace hired me to build a scalable database for their internal infrastructure as they started to compete more with companies like Amazon, Google, and the Cloud. In late 2008, I started working on Cassandra. I met Matt Pfeil shortly afterwards as he led the group that was going to be deploying Cassandra internally at Rackspace.

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Building a Retail Business in India: Manish Sharma, CEO of Printo (Part 3)

Sramana: So you partnered with Informix?

Manish Sharma: Yes, we partnered with Informix. They could not meet the deal requirements without us because they were a product provider, not a systems integrator. The database was a small part of the overall project. We had to submit our own credentials to win the bid. We worked directly with their executives and it was a lot of fun. He was generally interested in what we had to say. Everyone else that they worked with was still figuring out the web, we were the only people who had a lot of experience with web development.

As we were closing the partnership with Informix, they called and asked if we could drop our price. I was not ready for that question but I declined that request because we had already provided them with discounts. Their CTO called me back the next day and told me that we had better not mess this deal up because they were picking us over a bunch of other guys. >>>

Bootstrapping an App to $10 Million in Revenue: Christophe Bach, CEO of TextMe (Part 7)

Sramana: Can you talk, Christophe, about what has been your strategy in terms of building the team? You started with four co-founders and sounds like Julien came on board about a year later. Who else is on the team now, how big is the team and what has been your philosophy in building the team out?

Christophe: We have no choice but making the right choice the first time. We have a hiring process that is very precise and very strict, because we cannot make a mistake. For example, very early on we recognized that scalability will be critical for the business. What we did early on was hire Guillaume Plessis as a consultant to help us in scaling our infrastructure on AWS. He worked for us as a consultant for one year and knowing that he was really good, we asked him to join TextMe, a year later in early 2013, to become VP Infrastructure.

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Building a Retail Business in India: Manish Sharma, CEO of Printo (Part 2)

Sramana: Why would the National Stock Exchange commission ask you to build a mission critical transaction system? Did you have credentials to gain their confidence?

Manish Sharma: They were not our first customer. We were able to build a good portfolio before we started working on those high profile projects. Our first customer was Indian Oil Corporation. We did a small project for them.

Sramana: How did you sell to your early clients?

Manish Sharma: Nobody knew anything about the Internet when we started our company. Our approach did not focus on building an Internet site because there really was nothing for our clients to do on the Internet at that time. >>>

Bootstrapping an App to $10 Million in Revenue: Christophe Bach, CEO of TextMe (Part 6)

Sramana: Talk about the execution side. You mentioned that the ad networks were not really setup to work with a telecom company in this mode. So which ad network were you able to work with to get this model going?

Julien: Christophe, you want to take that one?

Christophe: Yeah. I would not say that they were not happy to work with us. It’s just that they are not used to seeing companies like us.

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Building a Retail Business in India: Manish Sharma, CEO of Printo (Part 1)

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

Manish Sharma is the co-founder and CEO of Printo, a Bangalore, India-based company specializing in high quality printing. Manish is a serial entrepreneur who began his career in 1995 as an early member of the startup team at Rediff.com. He went on to be the co-founder of DBS Internet Services, co-founder at New Economy Venture Group, and Global Director of Solutions for Pipal Software. He co-founded Printo in April of 2005. He is a graduate of the University of Oxford and Bombay University.

Sramana: Manish, let’s start with the beginning of your story. Where are you from? What is the backdrop to your entrepreneurial career?

Manish Sharma: I am from Bombay. I went to school there and was raised in a typical middle class family. My father is an engineer. I am a first generation entrepreneur. My father does not have business in his lineage. His father and grandfather were both engineers. >>>