20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you spin the Java story?

Scott Sellers: The other two founders worked for a company called Shasta Networks. This was in the late 90s. It was a cable and DSL model termination system. They built an appliance to do this. They put together the hardware and wrote a ton of software to make it all work. In the late 90s, they chose Java inside this appliance. This was on the leading edge in terms of what Java is capable of. They had a really nice outcome by selling it to Redback.

20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was your role in that founding team?

Scott Sellers: I was in the hardware engineering team. I managed the team and did a lot of coding and Verilog to do the chip design. We did all of our backend chip design in-house. I sat on the Board and raised money. It’s always the most entertaining part about building a company. It’s wonderful when you’re successful too. It’s so exciting when you’re at that inception point. It’s nothing other than the potential that you’re talking about.

20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 1)

VCs invest in startups that go from zero to $100M in 5 to 7 years. It has taken Azul almost 20 years to make that journey. Scott discusses the pivots and strategic shifts that have made the journey possible. With patience and persistence, and with an excellent two-pronged Open Source strategy, Scott has built Azul into a compelling business with many exit options from IPO to various acquisition paths.

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clickatell CEO Pieter de Villiers from South Africa (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is telecom the largest category in which you’re doing chat commerce?

Pieter de Villiers: Telecom is the largest category where we see high-volume adoption of chat commerce. However, we believe that financial services will eclipse that very soon.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of financial services?

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clickatell CEO Pieter de Villiers from South Africa (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: To do this on WhatsApp, what do you have from a technical layer point of view? Is WhatsApp giving you an API into which you are programming your facilities?

Pieter de Villiers: First of all, Clickatell was one of WhatsApp’s first business partners to enable brands to serve clients in this manner. You have to be a WhatsApp-authorized business partner to do these things. Number two is we provide a web interface in a cloud-managed environment where you would typically open a Clickatell account, select the channels you want to use, and start thinking through the customer problems you want to solve.

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clickatell CEO Pieter de Villiers from South Africa (Part 1)

This is a terrific story of a South African team of entrepreneurs who have provided tremendous thought leadership in mobile chat commerce and have built a great company.

Along the way, they raised money from Sequoia Capital and have achieved (unverified) Unicorn status. The beauty is that this is not a glorified Unicorn built out of financial engineering but one that is firmly rooted in strong revenue growth.

Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapping an EdTech Company to $10M: Boom Cards CEO Mary Oemig (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The $10 million in revenue, was that also 50/50?

Mary Oemig: Yes. It’s pretty standard that it splits that way. There is some seasonality. The pandemic was this weird surge. This school year is the new baseline, but the pattern has been consistent over the years.

Sramana Mitra: Is this still bootstrapped?

From Brazil to a US HRTech Success Story: Talentify: Othamar Filho (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: At what point did you start to get a steady stream of new customers?

Othamar Filho: It was in the middle of 2018 – a year and a half later. We started to see revenue from our direct clients grow. The reason was we were simplifying the product. What will help them make a decision faster? What will be something that would solve a pain point right now? That was the path. About two and a half years later, we got to a point where Cielo was 20% of our revenue.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of customers did you get that traction from?