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Startup, Survival, Scaling: Kareo CEO Dan Rodrigues (Part 2)

Sramana: You had some good work experiences while you were a student at the University of Washington. When you returned to California to attend UCLA, did you find similar opportunities?

Dan Rodrigues: After I returned to Southern California to attend UCLA, I got involved in the computer science department there. I ended up meeting up with four other students in the program. We started a project that later became my first start-up, Scour. This was in 1997 and 1998, and the search engine was designed to search for multimedia files. We indexed images, audio files and some video. There was a proliferation of multimedia content on the web. We started it as a fun and interesting project to develop our skills as students. It became really popular around campus at UCLA and then turned into a business. >>>

Startup, Survival, Scaling: Kareo CEO Dan Rodrigues (Part 1)

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Dan Rodrigues is the founder and CEO of Kareo. He founded the company in 2004 with a vision of simplifying medical offices with web-based medical billing software. Prior to launching Kareo, Dan started creating technology for the healthcare industry in 2001 as a co-founder and managing partner of Skematix, a software consulting firm based in Southern California. In the late 1990s, Dan was the co-founder and CEO of Scour, a search engine for finding music and video files online. Dan began his career as a software developer for RealNetworks and Visio. Dan holds a bachelors of science in computer science from the University of California.

Sramana: Dan, let’s start with the beginning of your personal story. Where are you from, where did you grow up, and what circumstances set you on your entrepreneurial journey?

Dan Rodrigues: I was born in Orange County, California. I grew up in a middle-class family. My father was a pilot and flight instructor who turned into a computer programmer and consultant. My mother was in a lot of different roles primarily doing administrative work. Both were entrepreneurial by nature, and both were very interested in computers. They also both taught me to be very independent and the value of hard work. >>>

Bootstrapping from Canada: FluidWare Co-CEO Aydin Mirzaee (Part 7)

Sramana: How much money have you raised to get where you are today?

Aydin Mirzaee: We have not raised any investment money. From time to time we have applied and won some government grants, but nothing major. We are basically a bootstrapped company. The co-founders did not take money for the first two years, and the third year we had a whopping salary of $24,000. >>>

Bootstrapping from Canada: FluidWare Co-CEO Aydin Mirzaee (Part 6)

Sramana: The survey market is quite full, and SurveyMonkey is a dominant player in the market. How did you compete against them?

Aydin Mirzaee: In the beginning we were focusing on the Canadian market. We met governmental regulations that gave us a niche market. Once we had that funding, we started to focus on expanding our feature sets to including things our competitors did not have. A generic tool will serve 80% of the market. We looked at the really expensive tools out there which were enterprise appliances and examined the features they had that online tools did not have. We applied all of those features with ease of use features. >>>

Bootstrapping from Canada: FluidWare Co-CEO Aydin Mirzaee (Part 5)

Sramana: Essentially you had to reposition yourselves in the marketplace. Where did you find your sweet spot?

Aydin Mirzaee: We decided to focus entirely on the super niche market and dominate that particular market before moving on. That would let us be a big fish in a small pond, and we would worry about the other ponds later. The first area we started focusing on was federal government departments. In 2008 when we were approaching them, they all told us that what we were doing was awesome but they had issues with our SaaS model. There was no way they were going to send their data to our cloud. >>>

Bootstrapping from Canada: FluidWare Co-CEO Aydin Mirzaee (Part 4)

Sramana: What specifically did he want built for $10,000?

Aydin Mirzaee: He wanted a system built for students to upload their business plans and presentations to a website for a business plan competition. The judges would be able to see the business plans and provide feedback and evaluation through the website. The website owner would then be able to see which business plans were the best and give them the award money. However, all students would be able to get feedback for their efforts. >>>

Bootstrapping from Canada: FluidWare Co-CEO Aydin Mirzaee (Part 3)

Sramana: What was the initial iteration of FluidWare?

Aydin Mirzaee: The first iteration was interesting because it was based on my former company. I had been trying to raise venture capital, and everyone told me that I had to get money from the Valley. It is easy to say, but I did not understand it. I went out and tried to find a bunch of email addresses for venture capitalists who were located in the Valley. I found a couple of hundred email addresses. >>>

Bootstrapping from Canada: FluidWare Co-CEO Aydin Mirzaee (Part 2)

Sramana: Did you start this company right after college?

Aydin Mirzaee: No, I actually started working at Nortel. They were a pretty big deal when I graduated in 2006. My first three months at Nortel were amazing. I was learning every day, exploring new things and ideas. After three months I learned everything I needed to know in my position, and things got boring. I was doing well and was a top performer, they gave me a team to manage and some raises, but I was not occupied to the extent that I wanted to be. >>>