Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Austin McChord, CEO of Datto (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You took the financing from Boston VCs?

Austin McChord: Yes, from General Catalyst up in Boston.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about your business. Tell us what you do. What is the competitive landscape that you play in and how do you differentiate?
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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Austin McChord, CEO of Datto (Part 1)

This interview focuses on some of the bottlenecks facing the cloud services industry in penetrating the SME customer base.

Sramana Mitra: Austin, give us a bit of context about you as well as Datto.

Austin McChord: I started Datto right out of college about seven years ago. Our goal was to provide backup and SaaS recovery in a better way and at a lower cost. With that, we pivoted towards the SMB market space. Now, we provide innovative solutions for businesses on the backup and SaaS recovery front. We go beyond simply recovering data and even go as far as avoiding downtime all together. Our company has grown really fast around that premise. We have  270 employees now and appliances on every continent except Antarctica. We have been experiencing doubling growth every year and I’m excited to continue that.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Koolspan CEO Gregg Smith (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Do you foresee consumer smartphones using your technology or do you foresee handset vendors catering to the consumer market building your chips into the devices? Is that how you see the market evolving?

Gregg Smith: Certainly, that’s how we want to see the market evolve overtime. One thing that we were able to do because of Mr. Snowden and the press that he generated was do a lot of mainstream media. We did a lot of television in the USA today. One of the things that proves to me is that there are consumers interested in talking securely and text messaging securely. That’s an area we’ll start to concentrate on more in 2014.

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Introducing a Company that is Doing Justice to Web 3.0

On February 14, 2007, I wrote a widely read post titled: Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS). On the Internet, it remains, after seven years, a widely read piece, defining a vision for the evolution of the web.

However, the web has not evolved according to this vision quite as rapidly as I had imagined. We have hardly seen the fragmented web mature into a more deeply personalized user experience.

Given that backdrop, I was excited to encounter a company recently that does realize the true potential of a context-specific, deeply personalized user experience that brings together content, community, commerce and vertical search.

Have a look at our recent Entrepreneur Journeys story: From Berlin, Bringing Art Auctions Online: Auctionata CEO Alexander Zacke.

Auctionata competes with Christie’s and Sotheby’s, engages a community of art collectors – both buyers and sellers, and art experts who know how to appraise and value art. It takes 20% from the buyers, and 20% from the sellers, and pays a commission to the experts who help them in each transaction. Given their items are high ticket, the business model is fabulously lucrative. I would even go so far as to say that this is one of the best business models I have seen on the web in a long time.

The entrepreneur, Alex Zacke, is from an Austrian family that has been in the art business for generations, and has deep domain knowledge of the art business. This background has enabled Alex to raise funding from VCs in Berlin on a powerpoint. The company is doing phenomenally well.

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Koolspan CEO Gregg Smith (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you deploy in a Fortune 500, is the assumption that the phones or tables the Fortune 500 employees are using are owned by the corporation and they custom-build your chips and other applications on top of that into these devices?

Gregg Smith: It can work in a couple of different ways. Yes, they can absolutely leverage the chip and our applications and build applications on top of that. For example, Samsung has done that with us. In other cases, we might just provide the chip and the application. One of our partners would provide the chip and the application and they would just use standard off-the-shelf apps that we sell every day.
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Are We in an Accelerator Bubble?

In a recent special issue on digital startups, The Economist writes:

The exact number [of accelerators] is unknown, but f6s.com, a website that provides services to accelerators and similar startup programmes, lists more than 2,000 worldwide. Some have already become big brands, such as Y Combinator, the first accelerator, founded in 2005. Others have set up international networks, such as TechStars and Startupbootcamp. Yet others are sponsored by governments (Startup Chile, Startup Wise Guys in Estonia and Oasis500 in Jordan) or big companies. Telefónica, a telecoms giant, operates a chain of 14 “academies” worldwide. Microsoft, too, is building a chain.

Predictably, many observers talk about an “accelerator bubble”. Yet if it is a bubble, it is unlikely ever to deflate completely. Accelerators are too useful for that. Not only do they bring startups up to speed, provide access to a network of contacts and give them a stamp of approval. They also perform a crucial function in the startup supply chain: picking the teams and ideas that are most likely to succeed and serving them up to investors.

In this post, we will discuss are we or are we not, and what is the prognosis for the trend?

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Koolspan CEO Gregg Smith (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So, one of the major trends that you’re tracking is government spying on corporate networks and you’re trying to provide a secure fortress around that?

Gregg Smith: That’s correct. We try to provide the best fortress we could build around all the communications I described earlier – sharing files, voice communications, and text communications.

Sramana Mitra: What other trends do you track or react to?

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Koolspan CEO Gregg Smith (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I guess the question that I’m asking you is somewhat broad. By saying that you deploy a secure mobile communication system, are you able to say that your customers are not being snooped on by the government? Are you able to say that the government cannot penetrate these systems?

Gregg Smith: In the security industry, you need to stay ahead of the hacking environment. You have to continually innovate to ensure that you’re providing the best security possible. While the threat level against the mobile ecosystem is very significant today and it’s no longer the kid in a dark bedroom, you’re looking at organized crime. You’re looking at friendly and foreign governments that are trying to listen in to your communications. From our standpoint, we need to continually innovate to stay ahead of that threat environment and that’s what we try to do every day.

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