From Zero to a Market Cap Bigger than General Motors: Keith Krach, Founder of Ariba (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You started navigating the venture capital industry in Silicon Valley?

Keith Krach: Yes, that was my introduction. We had five venture capitalists. It got to a point where we were running out of money.

Sramana Mitra: Who were these people? This is 1989. This is a very immature industry from a venture capital point of view. Who were the guys who were willing to work with you? >>>

Concept Financing for a Fat Startup: Tomer Shiran, CEO of Dremio (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In the time that you’ve cracked the market for your early customer base, what has become the dominant use case of the product?

Tomer Shiran: It’s actually pretty diverse now. It’s very horizontal.

Sramana Mitra: So you’re selling to IT?

Tomer Shiran: Oftentimes, we’re selling to IT. We’re either selling to IT or selling to the data consumers. It’s typically a VP of Analytics or a Chief Data Officer. It depends on the organization. The types of customers are pretty diverse. >>>

From Zero to a Market Cap Bigger than General Motors: Keith Krach, Founder of Ariba (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What years are we talking?

Keith Krach: We’re talking 1981 to 1987.

Sramana Mitra: You were at GM until ’87 or longer?

Keith Krach: Until ’87. I was Vice President at General Motors and was running a division. It was time to move on. They keep you moving when you’re high potential. I didn’t want to go back in the auto business. I just took a flight and came out to Silicon Valley. I hooked up with a company called Chronos. It was doing enterprise software for the process industry. It’s an early ERP company. The server was an IBM 3090. The client was a Stratos computer. >>>

Concept Financing for a Fat Startup: Tomer Shiran, CEO of Dremio (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was your experience in raising Series A?

Tomer Shiran: It was a very good one. We went through the process. We mapped out which investors we knew that we wanted to discuss this with. We probably met six or seven investors. A majority of them were interested in investing in the Series A. About a month later, we signed the term sheet with both Lightspeed and Redpoint co-leading our $12 million Series A.

Sramana Mitra: What drove that choice of Lightspeed and Redpoint?

Tomer Shiran: The first thing is it’s preferable if you can raise from tier one investors. They have the brand. >>>

From Zero to a Market Cap Bigger than General Motors: Keith Krach, Founder of Ariba (Part 1)

Ariba was the first B2B internet company in history. In this interview, we go back through one of the iconic ventures that shaped Silicon Valley, paving the way for much that came later.

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 circumstances?

Keith Krach: I was raised in a small town in Ohio right outside of Cleveland. My father had a five-person machine shop in the good times. It was just me and him in the tough times. >>>

Concept Financing for a Fat Startup: Tomer Shiran, CEO of Dremio (Part 2)

Tomer Shiran: Somewhere in the company, we have some data about our customers and business, but we don’t have that ability to ask questions and get an answer because the data is in so many places and it’s in various different structures. It really requires a lot of engineering effort to do anything with it.

The user that has the need to answer this question don’t have the necessary skills or the access to be able to do that. That was the premise. It was to see if we could solve that problem. It’s not, by any means, a new problem but one that companies have struggled with for a very long time. We thought that that provided an opportunity to do something very different from anything that had been done before in the world of analytics. >>>

Concept Financing for a Fat Startup: Tomer Shiran, CEO of Dremio (Part 1)

Yes, concept financing still happens from time to time, especially for fat startups, but you need to have deep domain knowledge, and strong investor relationships, to pull one off.

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

Tomer Shiran: I was actually born in Israel. At the age of one, I moved to the United States so that my dad could do his Ph.D. at Stanford. I spent the next 10 years living in the Bay Area. This was early 80’s. I was on Stanford campus most of the time. Then, we moved back to Israel when I was about 11. I then went through middle school and high school there. I did my military service and undergraduate at the Technion. >>>

Bootstrapping to $5 Million: Under30Experiences CEO Matt Wilson (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How has you blog content strategy changed as you morphed from writing about entrepreneurship to travel?

Matt Wilson: We ended up selling Under30CEO.com. We then decided to completely break off into a new content strategy and into a completely separate business. It was time for us to move on. I was running Under30Experiences and Jared O’Toole, my partner, was running Under30CEO.

We had to make a decision. Do we want to have two smaller companies or do we want to do one thing really well? We were able to sell one company and invest the money into the second company. We struggled for a long time, we were just two guys who were running a website and living at home with their parents. Luckily, our website has lots of things to buy now.

Sramana Mitra: If you’re good with content and if you can use content marketing to market something that you’re actually 

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