Bootstrapping with Services: 2600Hz CEO Patrick Sullivan (Part 5)

Patrick Sullivan: It turns out our billing system was turned off. We couldn’t have figured that out because it was so complex at that time. It was one of those things where it was just an eye-opener. You were working on so many different projects at the same time that you always have to fundamentally make sure that the key pieces are there, no matter what. Now we have these test suites that we’ve made.

It’s funny because when I tell the story, people are like, “How are you still in business? You guys seem to make every mistake possible.” A lot of entrepreneurs never started companies before. >>>

Bootstrapping with Services: 2600Hz CEO Patrick Sullivan (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking now?

Patrick Sullivan: That was between 2009 and 2011. Around 2012, we had our first real working platform. We open sourced it. The reason for open sourcing it is, we thought, “If we try to push this out to the world, let’s give this out for free. If we give away the base layer for free, people will still want to pay for support on top of the platform. Eventually, we can start adding paid applications that sit on top of the platform.”

In 2012, we started to change the company from consulting to support. In 2011, 90% of our revenue was from consulting. In 2012, >>>

Bootstrapping with Services: 2600Hz CEO Patrick Sullivan (Part 3)

Patrick Sullivan: We started going to a bunch of conferences and then we started explaining our vision on platforms. People started to listen. The next thing we know we started getting calls from people around the world. The problem was it was really hard to determine people who had money and interested versus people who wanted us to hire them. After a while, we ended up talking to this person who was working for a large telecom company.

Long story short, he wanted to come to our office. The problem is we didn’t have an office. If you get hired as a consultant, you >>>

Navigating Through Multiple Pivots: Convercent CEO Patrick Quinlan (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What else have you done that is an interesting strategic move, whether it’s accelerators or inflection points in your business?

Patrick Quinlan: You always learn from your failures more than your successes. The beginning of 2013 was really solid. We were able to raise capital from Sapphire. We had a go-to market plan. We had a product plan. Our product plan is utterly consistent with the first diagram we drew. It’s deeper and we know more. We understand it better, but I could still use that PowerPoint to sell that product. >>>

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. >>>