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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. >>>

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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 >>>