Featured Videos

CEO Transition, Founder Liquidity, and More: Bill Daniel, CEO AllWebLeads (Part 1)

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

Bill Daniel is a serial entrepreneur and the Chief Executive Officer of All Web Leads, an online provider of high quality insurance leads. Prior to joining the company in 2008, Bill was most recently the President and CEO of Surgient, a leading data-center virtualization management software company. Prior to Surgient, Bill held Senior Vice President roles at Vignette, a publicly-traded developer of content management software. Prior to Vignette, Bill founded a number of successful software companies including Wallop (acquired by IBM in 1998), Datis Corporation, and Mozart Systems. He previously held sales positions at Oracle and other Silicon Valley technology companies. Bill holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Dartmouth College and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

Sramana: Bill, let’s start with your background. What is the story that leads up to AllWebLeads?

Bill Daniel: I was born in an little town called Anderson, South Carolina. I married my wife, who I met in the 7th grade, and her maiden name also happened to be Anderson. I went to school at Dartmouth College. I joined Polaroid after college when they were the epitome of a high tech college. It was run by Dr. Edwin Land who invented the instant photography chemistry and mechanics. For someone like me who had an engineering background it was very intriguing. Within a few years I made my way out to Silicon Valley. >>>

Acquiring Deadpool Technology to Leapfrog a Services Company into Products: Canara CEO Steve Cotton (Part 7)

Sramana: Bootstrapping a company requires that you run a very tight ship. Can you comment on how you did that and how it impacted team building?

Steve Cotton: Every hire that you make has to have an ROI within six months to a year or it does not make sense. The people we brought on were scrutinized heavily. We would only on-board people when we were really comfortable that they were going to add value and bring something to the table. We have had a few poor hires, and when you do that in a bootstrapped company it is very expensive. >>>

Acquiring Deadpool Technology to Leapfrog a Services Company into Products: Canara CEO Steve Cotton (Part 6)

Sramana: Are you launching new products to have access to increase your TAM?

Steve Cotton: We have just announced the introduction of a new product that will be available late in the summer of 2013 called Branch Circuit Monitoring. We believe that will add more to our addressable market. Our market is very large. What we make is different than what the big three make and we have a better margin.

Sramana: TAM and margin are difference conversations. I am starting to see why you did not succeed with the VCs. You have a fine business and there are people happy to invest. The VC business is a very particular type of investment business. They are looking for very large bottom up TAM. They want growth at a very high pace, and that is probably what you encountered.

Steve Cotton: We did not fit their model. Our challenge and our passion are to show the marketplace that we will be able to grow to very high levels. >>>

Acquiring Deadpool Technology to Leapfrog a Services Company into Products: Canara CEO Steve Cotton (Part 5)

Sramana: Once you brought the new technology to the market, how did it do? How long did it take for it to find its stride?

Steve Cotton: The impact was immediate. Our expectations were very conservative, but within two quarters our entire customer based flipped over to our product as opposed to the other products we were selling. We did well because we were the trusted advisor. The box was the trusted enabler of the service.

Sramana: What is the revenue growth from 2009 to 2013?

Steve Cotton: We grew in that phase and burst through the $10 million point. Last year we did a $22 million private equity deal with Columbia Capital, and our revenues were close to the size of that deal. We basically bootstrapped to that point. >>>

Acquiring Deadpool Technology to Leapfrog a Services Company into Products: Canara CEO Steve Cotton (Part 4)

Sramana: What was so promising about the new technology that made you want to acquire it?

Steve Cotton: In the world of battery monitoring, we were frustrated with monolithic systems based on 1980s designs. You would have a big panel sitting in a wall with batteries from floor to ceiling. Those systems were customized and difficult to manufacture. There was a migration from monolithic systems to modular systems, but even then you still had a lot of wires to deal with, and it was difficult to manage.

The technology we acquired had one node that you would stick in the battery between the positive and negative terminal and connect them with a cat 5 wire to a controller. It was unique to the marketplace. They had applied for and received two patents on the technology. It engineered out all of the problems that we had seen and offered promise to engineer in a lot of unique benefits. >>>

Acquiring Deadpool Technology to Leapfrog a Services Company into Products: Canara CEO Steve Cotton (Part 3)

Sramana: How did revenue scale as you following this strategy?

Steve Cotton: We started with revenues of $470,000 and then went to $1.5 million and got up to $7.5 million. This cash revenue gave us some flexibility to develop a strategy for the future. We looked into the marketplace and found a technology company that had a next generation battery monitor. A lot of money had been put into that by venture capitalists and family investors. They had become insolvent, and we found a great match where we had market access, context, and customer access and they had IP. The technology itself was great. It had a green, yellow and red light for every battery, and we could control that with our monitoring operation center that we staffed. >>>

Acquiring Deadpool Technology to Leapfrog a Services Company into Products: Canara CEO Steve Cotton (Part 2)

Sramana: Was your father’s business model basically selling services around someone else’s product?

Steve Cotton: Yes. The company’s business model was essentially a manufacturer’s representative of a battery monitor product. Companies would deploy these systems into their data centers, and then when they would have problems they would realize that there had been indicators in the data gathered by the software for the previous month. My father built a business by providing a managed service to look at the data from those batter monitoring systems. That grew exponentially when he started to land national accounts. In the late 1990s, I came in and started helping him. I crafted a web-based version of the service. That was the early concept that we put together. >>>

Acquiring Deadpool Technology to Leapfrog a Services Company into Products: Canara CEO Steve Cotton (Part 1)

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

Steve Cotton is the founder and executive chairman of Canara, a company that provides turnkey backup power solutions and predictive monitoring solutions for mission critical operations focusing on data centers, telecommunications sites, wind/solar farms, smart grid and electric vehicles. Prior to Canara he was the director of sales at Sendmail, Inc. He has also worked in business development at Lucent Technologies and as a Product Manager at Octel Communications. He has a MIS in information technology from California State University.

Sramana: Steve, where does your story begin? What is the background that put your on the career path to where you are today at Canara?

Steve Cotton: My career started with Octel Communications. I started for them right out of college. I started off as a product manager before going into business development and sales. I spent 12 years there. It was an entrepreneurial company but had already reach 40 million dollars in revenue before I joined. We grew the company to 1 billion dollars of revenue before we were acquired by Lucent Technologies. >>>