Building a Global HR Tech Business from India: Adit Jain, CEO of Leena AI (Part 1)

Adit and his cofounders started Leena AI in India, bootstrapped to validation, applied to YCombinator, got in. Since then, they’ve built a fantastic, venture-funded global HR Tech business that is successfully competing with Salesforce and ServiceNow. Superb story!

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

Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma (Part 1)

Manan’s professor parents in Amritsar didn’t want him to be an entrepreneur. Now, he is changing the trajectory of Math education around the globe by leveraging an underused workforce: stay-at-home moms with strong mathematics background in India. Brilliant story!

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

Building a Mid-Market Cyber Security Company from Utah: Peter Bookman, CEO of Guard Dog (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In that funnel, you’re leading with audits?

Peter Bookman: Often. When you know the consultants are saying, “It’s $25,000 to come in and take my laptop and walk through your halls. I’m going to connect to your network and produce a report that you’re going to do something with.” The report is going to create a risk profile without a score.

If you happen to be doing that, we can come and, for a fraction of the cost, we can provide that same information and also semi real-time. You can get that same visibility and one more important thing, which is the ability to interrupt an attempted exploit. Whether that’s us, MSP, or a CISO, that’s very dependent on the organization. Each one has its own preferred means of escalation and dealing with things.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is an average deal size from your direct customers?

Paresh Patel: It’s very skewed. We have customers whose deal sizes are in the millions. We also have deal sizes that are in the hundreds or thousands. We have customers that have more than a hundred thousand machines with us. Then we have customers that are buying 50 machines. It varies quite a bit.

Sramana Mitra: Did you do another financing round?

Building a Mid-Market Cyber Security Company from Utah: Peter Bookman, CEO of Guard Dog (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Not only that, it addresses my next question. The enterprise CISO right now is so overwhelmed. For a startup, to get an audience with an enterprise CISO has become almost impossible. There are the known players, but that’s about it. When it comes to the new players, they have to go through somebody. Mid-market doesn’t have that level of crowdedness.

Peter Bookman: Speaking specifically for cyber security, that ended up being what we drafted into. Listening is a very important skill. Always be quick to adapt. There was an interesting gap. Mid-market and small don’t tend to have CISO’s. They can’t afford them. I could go to the enterprise, but it’s uphill. They have a lot to manage.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Paresh Patel: We started to prepare the company for scale. We had just received our Series A. We got $12 million in the bank. I first hired a COO and then a CFO. We opened up a new office. We messed up. We hired too fast and too big. Too many positions that didn’t really need to be hired for yet.

Sramana Mitra: Series A is more about how to build the product and how to sell the product.

Building a Mid-Market Cyber Security Company from Utah: Peter Bookman, CEO of Guard Dog (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s come back to your story. Did Fusion-io go public?

Peter Bookman: It did. It was relatively smooth. A year and a half later, I left to start a virtual desktop company. That transacted again to another storage company Sandisk. I love listening to and solving a real problem. Whether we look at virtual private networks that are very prolific and common today as well as storage, they’re not in all of the cloud.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after you left?

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The form factor of your product was that you would just clip it on a retail machine?

Paresh Patel: The design was remarkably simple. It almost works like a thumb drive. You just take the device and plug it into the machine. In three seconds, it could take that legacy machine and convert it into a modern mobile machine.

Sramana Mitra: A million and a half worth of orders were from how many customers?‘