From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do next?

Manish Jethani: It was a very comfortable role, but that comfort was making me uncomfortable. I was used to solving problems. I wanted to go back and do a startup again. Being well-positioned in a well-funded startup didn’t bring any additional challenge of sorts. I wanted to go back and do a startup again.

From Hard Core Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Francis Dinha, CEO of OpenVPN (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the current problem that you could solve in 2005?

Francis Dinha: One of my friends started a company in Dallas. They were trying to solve the problem of circumventing the firewall. They raised about $35 million. He said, “How are we going to solve this problem?” I got this technology that’s like tunneling. I said, “I can structure a deal with you, but I don’t want to come and work as a consultant. We’re going to build this, but we’re going to provide a service as part of a subscription.” That was my first customer.

From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Why do you think the VC was calling you? What did he know about what you were doing?

Manish Jethani: Some local newspaper caught the Facebook post in the group. They saw that we got 1,700 signups in four hours. She wrote a story around that. That got us a bit of media coverage and some kind of popularity. That’s how the fund discovered us.

Sramana Mitra: When you got this call, were you already in operation?

From Hard Core Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Francis Dinha, CEO of OpenVPN (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do in your first venture?

Francis Dinha: I gave Ericsson three months’ notice. I was going to build something related to switching while doing everything in software. That was my first venture where I made my first million dollars.

Sramana Mitra: Who was the customer?

From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You talked to me about doing a startup in the beauty space. What do you know about the beauty space? You don’t have a particular domain expertise. When you go into a field where you don’t have real domain knowledge, it doesn’t create for the kind of passion that drives a startup to go big. There are exceptions of course. A good formula is you want to go after something that you have a passion for.

Manish Jethani: More than the domain expertise, one thing that has the shortest lifespan is the borrowed conviction. You cannot build something on a borrowed conviction.

From Hard Core Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Francis Dinha, CEO of OpenVPN (Part 1)

Francis has bootstrapped OpenVPN to $3M ARR with JUST $1M in financing. Wonderful story!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Francis Dinha: I was born in northern Iraq in a place called Amadiya. I lived there until I was six years old. Due to the Baghdad-Iraqi war, we had to escape. There was a lot of bombing. I remember the bombing of our village. It reminds me of the current situation in Ukraine. We had to escape to Baghdad.

From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When you moved out in 2011, you had already transitioned from being a hardcore nerdy developer to someone experienced in sales. You had some understanding of what it takes to close enterprise deals. What happens next?

Manish Jethani: I still felt like an engineer who was trying to apply the engineering concepts to sales. The engineer in me has never left. Nothing gives me more joy than creating something. Building a product is still very thrilling.

From Hardcore Techie to Unicorn Entrepreneur: Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 6 )

Sramana Mitra: Did you do shareholder communication?

Dheeraj Pandey: All the time. I like it. There was a thesis to be sold as well. After we went public is when we started to transition the business model. It probably was the biggest business model transition the IT world has ever seen – going from hardware, to software, to subscription in three years. Communication is not something you can shy away from in these things.