Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 1)

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This is an interesting story of how an open source software company built around Cassandra was incubated by RackSpace and has grown to $5 million in revenue. Founded by engineers Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, the interview traces not only the successes of their journey but also the mistakes they made in structuring their funding rounds.

Sramana Mitra: Jonathan and Matt, let’s start with both of your backgrounds. Where you were born? Where did you grow up? How did you get together?

Jonathan Ellis: I grew up in New Jersey. I met Matt after I moved to Texas to work for Rackspace. Rackspace hired me to build a scalable database for their internal infrastructure as they started to compete more with companies like Amazon, Google, and the Cloud. In late 2008, I started working on Cassandra. I met Matt Pfeil shortly afterwards as he led the group that was going to be deploying Cassandra internally at Rackspace.

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Harvard Business Review: How To Fund Indian Start-Ups

Harvard Business Review has published Sramana Mitra’s piece How To Fund Indian Start-Ups. You can read the entire article here.

New Book – Seed India: How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap In India

While tremendous interest in entrepreneurship in India continues to surge, there is a troubling and corresponding shortage of seed capital to help get these entrepreneurs’ ventures off the ground.

Sramana Mitra, one of the most highly regarded writers on the Indian startup scene, analyzes the current state of the startup eco-system in India in the latest addition to her acclaimed Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Seed India: How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap In India (December 2013; Amazon Kindle). Mitra proposes ways of navigating the rest of the decade, such that a robust pipeline of entrepreneurs can survive the current malaise, and thrive, while the eco-system develops and matures in parallel.
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Seed Capital: Inventus Capital Partners

1M/1M ambassador Irina Patterson talks with Parag Dhol of Inventus Capital Partners.

Irina Patterson: Please tell us briefly about your personal background and about your fund.

Parag Dhol: Inventus Capital Partners is a U.S.–India venture firm managed by successful entrepreneurs and industry operating veterans who have backed over 100 entrepreneurs with operations in India and/or Silicon Valley. Inventus backs entrepreneurs first and foremost. The companies financed by Inventus include redBus (acquired by MIH/Naspers and our biggest success), Vizury, Credit Sesame, Savaari, PoshMark, Power2sme, Policybazaar and eDreams, among others. Inventus started investing out of Fund-II earlier this year. >>>

How to Navigate India’s Seed Capital Gap

India has a minuscule seed capital ecosystem. Entrepreneurs thus have to be really creative to survive.

My new piece How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap in India offers a synthesis of how entrepreneurs are getting around. Two companion pieces offer perspective on why the ecosystem is developing so slowly: Seed Investors in India: Why So Few? and Venture Capital in India: Age of Reckoning. >>>

Seed Investors In India: Why So Few?

As I have written in previous columns, the seed capital ecosystem in India is a real bottleneck right now. There are no more than a couple of hundred seed investments that are happening a year. Even if the number doubles this year, it is still a terribly inadequate number to build a real pipeline of hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs that can meaningfully impact the country.

How can we change this?

To answer that question, we need to first understand why there is such a shortage of seed money in the Indian IT entrepreneurship ecosystem.

You see, Silicon Valley’s angel investors were all either entrepreneurs themselves, or part of an entrepreneurial venture that succeeded sufficiently for its early employees to make significant money. Most of them went through the experience of building a technology product, taking it to market, watching it take off in the market, and then reaping the benefits of that success.
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How To Navigate the Seed Capital Gap in India

Even though interest in entrepreneurship is at its highest in India, the country has a nominal seed capital infrastructure. As you know, I concern myself with issues of scalability and pipeline building. The question that I have been pondering for the last ten years is: how do you develop a sustainable pipeline of entrepreneurs?

Of course, this discussion pertains to my field: IT and IT-enabled services. India has numerous small retailers, service providers, etc. who are shining examples of scrappy entrepreneurship at its best.

But how do we take advantage of the increasing penetration of information technology into the consumer and business populations in India? And how, through technology, do we empower Indian entrepreneurs to build global businesses?
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Is Too Much Liquidity In The Angel Capital Market Good or Bad?

Too much dumb money rushing into the angel investment game is inevitable with crowdsourcing, AngelList and other innovations. Innovation is welcome. Liquidity for startups is welcome. How much is too much?

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