Bootstrapping with Services: 2600Hz CEO Patrick Sullivan (Part 2)

Patrick Sullivan: I worked in sales at Xerox. They have a world-class sales program. At the end of the day, I learned a ton about the business side. You get quite an education on how companies are built. You work with so many companies that you start to see how companies operate. I did that for seven years. A long time ago, I still remember my dad telling me, “At some point in your life, you should never work for someone.” That stuck with me.

After seven years at Xerox, I did pretty well. I was at a bar with a buddy and I’ve known this guy for a couple of years. He looked at me and said, “I heard you’re good at business. I’m trying to start a company. I’ll deal with the product stuff and you deal with the >>>

Navigating Through Multiple Pivots: Convercent CEO Patrick Quinlan (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2012?

Patrick Quinlan: Going all the way back to Delta and to Rivet, there was this trend of finding something that existed. It didn’t need momentum. We were very good at extending at. We wanted to find a company where there’s no majority shareholder, but had a huge addressable market.

We had a list of six things that it had to be or could not be – had to be SaaS, no majority owner. We found this small company in Denver called Business Controls. This was the one we settled on. We had a solid reputation coming out of Rivet. We went into that, took over ownership, and then very quickly raised $10 million. >>>

Bootstrapping with Services: 2600Hz CEO Patrick Sullivan (Part 1)

Here’s yet another great case study of a successful bootstrapping whereby the entrepreneurs developed a solid product business eventually.

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

Patrick Sullivan: I was born in California. I eventually went to school at Santa Barbara and got a degree in Computer Science. I graduated in 1999. I moved back to Tahoe to be a ski bum for a year to get that out of my system. Then I moved to San Francisco right before the dot-com crash happened. It was a pretty awful thing from a career standpoint.

Sramana Mitra: What brought you to San Francisco? >>>

Navigating Through Multiple Pivots: Convercent CEO Patrick Quinlan (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You also need the direct to get the reference customers before you can get the channel to accept to sell you.

Patrick Quinlan: I don’t agree with that one. None of the customers were turning on. The customers were paying us. This was late 2009. Nobody had to file till 2010. What I did was I looked at the landscape and looked who is in this filing business. I quickly saw that RR Donnelley is the company that owns the vast majority of the filing business. What the mandate said is people who used to file in print now had to be electronic and in an interactive format. >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ephesoft Founder Ike Kavas (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Wonderful capital-efficient entrepreneurship. Where do you want to go from here?

Ike Kavas: We’re in the final stages of Series A. I’d like Ephesoft to remain a technology company and keep innovating. In 2013, we came up with a web service API. It brought new ways of thinking around what we do for our customers. In 2015, we came up with mobile capture where you can actually do your work on the phone offline.

Last year in November, we announced our new edition. It’s called Ephesoft Insights. We have the domain expertise on how to find >>>

Navigating Through Multiple Pivots: Convercent CEO Patrick Quinlan (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was it about your background that gave you any affinity towards that industry?

Patrick Quinlan: I wish I had a great answer to that, but I don’t. I love to eat out with my wife. We have a very funny way of going out to dinner. We get in a car. We pull out of the driveway. If we go left on the street called Cofax, there’s a bunch of immigrant non-US food joints. If you go right, you go to the cool bistros, farm-raised stuff, two blocks down that street. Once we decide right or left, we just go somewhere.

Even when we’re in different cities, we just walk in places. Where I’ve ended up in my companies is very much that same thing. >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ephesoft Founder Ike Kavas (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 2012?

Ike Kavas: We got a few more sales people. We continue to expand in every location in America. If I remember correctly, our revenues went up to $550,000 that year. From there, we went to $1.1 million. The next year, it was $2.4 million.

Sramana Mitra: So $2.4 million in 2014?

Ike Kavas: Yes. >>>

Navigating Through Multiple Pivots: Convercent CEO Patrick Quinlan (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The truth is, you can learn income statement. Learning leadership is a much harder thing. Leadership is something that is either you have it naturally or don’t. It’s not so simple.

Patrick Quinlan: I would agree. We certainly see people who are uncomfortable leaders who have done good. At the end of the day, you can learn it. You either have that ownership or you don’t. You can get better at it.

Sramana Mitra: You can get better at it with experience. I think people are either natural leaders or not natural leaders. I don’t know. That’s just my bias. When this company was sold, what year was this happening? >>>