Featured Videos

Building a Robust Business with Eugene (Oregon) Angels Investors: Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerId (Part 7)

Sramana: Are your investors all Eugene based?

Jake Weatherly: Most of them are; however, we do have an investor from the Los Angeles area, and one in far eastern Oregon.

Sramana: What is the entrepreneurship community like in Eugene?

Jake Weatherly: It is an area that is near and dear to my heart. This is where Nike was founded. We have great schools. We have a handful of interesting companies. There is an interesting tech scene here. There is actually a movement to brand the technology and startup scene here. The brand is the Silicon Shire. >>>

Building a Robust Business with Eugene (Oregon) Angels Investors: Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerId (Part 6)

Sramana: I have been noticing a trend lately. Companies are building very sizable revenue with small teams. The ideal example of this is FineArtAmerica which, when I spoke with them, they were doing $5 million dollars a year with three people. He had all sorts of outsourcing. You have 16 employees and are approaching $5 million. What is your growth dependent on?

Jake Weatherly: Without question, we can get significantly farther with our current team. Adding project managers is important because we feel that it is critically important to provide excellent service and hand holding in the implementation process with our clients. We primarily use a direct sales model, but we are getting more and more traction, which means highly qualified leads with short sales cycles, based entirely on word of mouth and industry adoption. When we get a key customer in a segment, then there are a lot of folks who follow. They keep a pulse on their competition and when an early adopter moves forward, then others follow. >>>

Building a Robust Business with Eugene (Oregon) Angels Investors: Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerId (Part 5)

Sramana: Your TAM is essentially tied to the number of transactions you can process. You really needed to get a handle on the volume of transactions going through your system. What did you define your TAM after this reality emerged?

Jake Weatherly: We look at all of our segments somewhat uniquely. We also look at the industries where exclusive offers are prevalent to inform that. College students have a buying power of $417 billion annually. In 2012 they spent 12.9 billion dollars in apparel which was up 126% from 2011, and 72% of students buy apparel online. We look at industries very specifically, especially when instant verification can be an improvement in the customer experience or it can create parity in the offers that are available for store based offers which require identification and the lack of corresponding offers online because of a lack of identity verification. >>>

Building a Robust Business with Eugene (Oregon) Angels Investors: Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerId (Part 4)

Sramana: What was the reason you were making pitches? Were you trying to raise capital?

Jake Weatherly: We were pitching for practice in the beginning, but it was warming up to raise capital. In our first round we raised just over 1 million dollars and just over 1.5 million dollars in the second round. Both rounds have been with a small group of private investors. In the second round we were flattered to have everyone follow on from the first round.

Sramana: What was the source of your private investors? Did they come from the incubator?

Jake Weatherly: Some came from the incubator and others came from our existing networks. We did skip the friends and family round. We went from bootstrapping to picking professional investors. We did not have any institutional money. We had very seasoned, hard-core investors. We did not want to go from bootstrapping to having friends and family writing checks from their savings accounts.

>>>

Building a Robust Business with Eugene (Oregon) Angels Investors: Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerId (Part 3)

Sramana: When you set out to deliver an eligibility verification service and technology, did you have specific questions that you wanted to frame the capability around?

Jake Weatherly: One of the things that we uncovered in the early stages in terms of personally identifiable information, where security is a huge concern, is the need to attach that to the customer experience. What are you willing to submit in order to have your eligibility verified? >>>

Building a Robust Business with Eugene (Oregon) Angels Investors: Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerId (Part 2)

Sramana: What years were you at WebEx?

Jake Weatherly: I was there from 2005 to 2006. I was there when the company was preparing for an acquisition. It was a fantastic experience and I was fortunate enough to be there during the acquisition. I stayed there for a quarter after the acquisition before I was wooed back to Palo Alto Software. Tim had handed the company down to his daughter and son-in-law. A lot of things that we had talked about for years, in terms of growth and new product pipeline, were officially on the roadmap. >>>

Building a Robust Business with Eugene (Oregon) Angels Investors: Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerId (Part 1)

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

Jake is the co-founder and CEO of SheerID, an online shopping cart platform which provides instant, seamless group verification. For more than 15 years, Jake has focused his career on entrepreneurship and small business growth. He has traveled the world to teach business and marketing planning to small businesses, consultants, large enterprises, universities, and government organizations. He co-authored the province of Alberta, Canada’s Tourism Marketing education program, developed Pearson Education’s business feasibility analysis software and Integrated Marketing Communications program. Jake is a graduate of the University of Oregon.

Sramana: Jake, let’s start by reviewing your background. Where did you grow up? What put you on your entrepreneurial path?

Jake Weatherly: I grew up just outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan. I was raised by a family of Michigan Wolverines. I grew up with a “Blue and Maize” room. I got into skiing and ski racing and really enjoyed it, so I broke with family tradition and did not go to school in Michigan, instead I went East so I could focus on collegiate ski racing. I attended Middlebury College my freshman year and destroyed my shoulder while I was there. I was laid up the summer between my freshman and sophomore years. My then-girlfriend, and now wife, and I decided that it was time to head West. >>>

Internet Advertising Pioneer: Kevin O’Connor, Founder of DoubleClick and FindTheBest (Part 7)

Sramana: We have seen several bubbles in our industry. First the dot com, second Web 2.0, and now the app craze. Investors made very irrational decisions in each of these bubbles. When will they learn? Why don’t people ever learn?

Kevin O’Connor: There are probably a couple of reasons why. I am fairly skeptical of technology even though I love it. People want to believe it is the panacea for all problems. The masses think every new technology will change the world and solve our problems. You and I are skeptical. Fortunes are made in bubbles if you can time it right. >>>