Bootstrapping a High Growth Cyber Security Venture with a Paycheck: Christian Geyer, CEO of ACTFORE (Part 1)

Christian convinced the Board of his employer to let him incubate a Cyber Security startup idea as a division of the company with an express intent of spinning it off.

Now, the company has been spun out, doing almost $20M in bootstrapped annual revenue, and may soon find a lucrative Exit. This is a phenomenal story for entrepreneurs considering the Bootstrapping with a Paycheck route.

Building a Venture Scale AI Developer Tool Company: Moderne CEO Jonathan Schneider (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Can you elaborate on how you’re working with the open source community and is that a source of leads?

Building a Venture Scale AI Developer Tool Company: Moderne CEO Jonathan Schneider (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I have a question that comes to my mind. Enterprises have very diverse applications and frameworks. Are there particular frameworks that you specialize in, do better in, or have more training in? Or you can basically walk into any enterprise, do this training right there, and basically build from there?

Building a Venture Scale AI Developer Tool Company: Moderne CEO Jonathan Schneider (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So now, tell me more about the product and especially where is AI in this story?

Jonathan Schneider: We think of Moderne as large-scale automated code change. That could be for application modernization, security vulnerability repair, or code quality.

Building a Venture Scale AI Developer Tool Company: Moderne CEO Jonathan Schneider (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So now what about the go-to-market strategy? What were you settling into? You were talking to customers all this while. What was emerging as the go-to-market strategy?

Building a Venture Scale AI Developer Tool Company: Moderne CEO Jonathan Schneider (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So, what gave you confidence that you would be able to solve this problem and build a product? Did you have an architecture already laid out? Did you have the product design already in place?

Building a Venture Scale AI Developer Tool Company: Moderne CEO Jonathan Schneider (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Did you quit and then start or did you start while you still had your job? How did you get started?

Building a Venture Scale AI Developer Tool Company: Moderne CEO Jonathan Schneider (Part 1)

Jonathan has found a great, very large niche within the AI-powered Developer Tools space.The idea was born out of deep domain knowledge and customer exposure. VCs love such depth of technical insights and have funded Moderne lavishly.