Pinterest’s Valuation Rises; Revenues Remain a Mystery

Twitter’s recent IPO has sparked  interest in IPOs of other social media sites. The next big one that the market is waiting for is online scrapbooking site,  Pinterest. Launched in 2010, Pinterest’s growth has seen phenomenal growth and is the third most popular website in the U.S. after Facebook and Twitter.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Not Just Wine in Bordeaux – Interview with Benjamin Mestrallet, Founder and CEO of eXo (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Up to a point everybody has to do it. Nobody finances concepts anymore. Everybody wants to see a business. So you have to bootstrap up to a certain point. Then, when you are in Silicon Valley or a place that has a seed capital system, you can get money to start. If you are in Bordeaux, for instance, you are not going to get any money.

Benjamin Mestrallet: No, but you can get money from the government. It is a bit different. You didn’t use to have angels in France. Now you have. At the time it was much easier for us to get funds from the government. We used some of that. This year we also met a spin-off. We raised a lot of money for the spin-off – about $9 million. This market is very different. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Not Just Wine in Bordeaux – Interview with Benjamin Mestrallet, Founder and CEO of eXo (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: The reason I am asking you these questions is that I imagine there are a lot of people sitting in our shoes who want to have their own social networks.

Benjamin Mestrallet: That is what is interesting about the market. If you look at the social market, it looks like a consolidated market with one mind share leader, which is Jive. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Not Just Wine in Bordeaux – Interview with Benjamin Mestrallet, Founder and CEO of eXo (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So you compete with Jive?

Benjamin Mestrallet: Yes. But we have features that compete with Yammer or others.

SM: So you do have full social media capability now?

BM: We have 80% of the features you can find on Jive. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Not Just Wine in Bordeaux – Interview with Benjamin Mestrallet, Founder and CEO of eXo (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is this SI a Latin American SI?

Benjamin Mestrallet: Yes.

SM: So in Latin America you have been able to get the SI deals as well?

BM: Yes, but it was them contacting us. This one is unusual, but it happened like that. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Not Just Wine in Bordeaux – Interview with Benjamin Mestrallet, Founder and CEO of eXo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What you are describing is standard nowadays. I run my entire company with a virtual team.

Benjamin Mestrallet: That is how we used to do it, too. In September 2009, however, I moved with the entire family and got the visa in February 2010. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Not Just Wine in Bordeaux – Interview with Benjamin Mestrallet, Founder and CEO of eXo (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: And the two other people working with you on this project were also from this school in Bordeaux?

Benjamin Mestrallet: No. One was from Canada and the other one from Ukraine. We met online and started working together. When the U.S. Department of Defense came and asked us to do some consulting services first, we had to create a company. So we created the company, but we had never met before. The company was headquartered in France, while our only customer was a U.S. customer. At that point we were doing consulting services for them for about one year. This was 2003. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Not Just Wine in Bordeaux – Interview with Benjamin Mestrallet, Founder and CEO of eXo (Part 1)

Benjamin Mestrallet is the founder and chief executive officer of eXo, a company that helps other companies connect their employees through social intranets, websites and dashboards. Benjamin started the eXo project in 2002 while still a student. He holds an advanced master’s degree in management science from the University of Paris IX Dauphine. In this interview he describes his journey with eXo, which started in France and has expanded to several other countries, and talks about the different facets of the open source industry.

Sramana Mitra: Benjamin, where are you from?

Benjamin Mestrallet: I am from France.

SM: Where did you grow up in France?

BM: I grew up in Africa, actually. >>>