Raising Funding on AngelList: Contactually CEO Zvi Band (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year are we at now?

Zvi Band: Around 2010. I had just been the CTO of an enterprise startup. I was consulting. I then tried starting my own projects. It was called Structo. Are you familiar with parse and convey and all these backend service tools?

Sramana Mitra: No.

Zvi Band: The whole idea is that it could be like a remote hosted database so that the developer wouldn’t need a database or a backend. They could build a mobile application or a web application and we would handle the backend. I tried it. It failed. Honestly, it didn’t fail because it was a bad idea. It failed because I >>>

Building a Fast Growing FinTech Company from Utah: MX CEO Ryan Caldwell (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What happens after?

Ryan Caldwell: I went to do consulting. I wanted to be at the heart of San Francisco. I did consulting for companies like Microsoft and Visa in London and Singapore.

Sramana Mitra: What was the next major thing that you did after selling this company?

Ryan Caldwell: I gained some experience with large corporations and how they work. I owned about 90% of the company when I sold it, so it was a meaningful exit for me personally. I wanted to see how large companies work, how they made decisions, and what that side was like. >>>

Raising Funding on AngelList: Contactually CEO Zvi Band (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Zvi has raised several rounds of financing on AngelList in the process of building Contactually. Among other things, his experience with the platform is interesting in this interview.

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?

Zvi Band: I was born in Boston. I was mainly raised on the West Coast. Then my family moved to the DC area to follow my father’s career. I’ve been now a DC resident for the past 15 years. I would qualify myself as a builder. As a kid, I always had Legos in my hands. Legos turned into software and software turned into companies. >>>

Building a Fast Growing FinTech Company from Utah: MX CEO Ryan Caldwell (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Ryan self-financed, with some seed money, a FinTech company selling to small financial institutions. Today, the company has delivered 185% y-o-y growth for five consecutive years.

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?

Ryan Caldwell: I was born in Berlin, Germany. My father was a lawyer in the military. He was stationed in Germany at that time. My older brother and I were both born in Germany.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do for college? >>>

Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: For your core business, you go seek out customers in a direct selling model. The open-source conversion is not your core business?

Hiro Yoshikawa: Correct. This is one of the interesting challenges that we are facing right now. Some investors called us open-source business 2.0. Historically, the open-source commercialization companies have a very typical freemium model. This is not our model. Our idea is to focus on developing the open source technologies, distribute to open-source communities, and then acquire users. >>>

Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Did you raise money in 2012 and how much?

Hiro Yoshikawa: We raised an additional $1.8 million of seed extension round in 2012 led by Jerry Yang and Dan Scheinman. We ended up raising the very first venture capital round in July of 2013 led by Tim Guleri of Sierra Ventures.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, I know him.

Hiro Yoshikawa: Tim is an awesome venture capitalist.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you say you raised from Sierra? >>>

Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Give me an example of your first customer who understood your vision and signed up. What was the process of getting to your first customer?

Hiro Yoshikawa: We started the company operations in December 2011. We launched the initial product in September of 2012.

Sramana Mitra: You raised venture capital before all this?

Hiro Yoshikawa: Bill and Morio led the first million dollar round in late 2011. We started developing our initial beta product focusing on the open source data collection technologies and also the back-end database and the data warehouse to enable the collective data to get stored and analyzed. We started >>>

Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You already started thinking about doing something of your own?

Hiro Yoshikawa: He influenced me to start thinking about it. I have to say that until I met him, I didn’t really have any clear idea about starting my own company. He was the influencer. We had joint trips together. When I took him to Japan, I was introduced to the community leader of Hadoop. His name is Kazuki Ohta. Everyone calls him Kaz.

He ended up becoming my co-founder. Kaz and I have a very good chemistry even though both of us are in the very same space. He was more like a community leader. My background was more in business. In the last three years, I did a lot of venture investments. I started spending a lot of time with him and learned a lot about real-world Hadoop use cases. Kaz was involved in many early stage Hadoop implementation projects. He was clearly very sharp and entrepreneurial. He started coming to my house in Silicon Valley. >>>