Building Fat Startups: Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez (Part 6)

Andres Rodriguez: I’ll tell you the short answer. For young entrepreneurs today, they can do it but they have to have technical people in the team that have lots of equity in the company. The one thing that an investor wants to see is the proof point that you have a concept. This is for the kind of company that you were just telling me about where what you’re trying to prove is a concept. It’s really about getting traction or users. I don’t think it has changed as long as you can get a technical team that can work. A group of two or three engineers can build a lot of value to prove a concept in six months. An investor will fund that. That is the way to do it with no track record.

Sramana Mitra: You’re right. That’s a very interesting observation. You can build if it’s a group of highly-skilled engineers who are willing to work for equity and do not cost a lot of cash. You can get to a certain level of validation working with customers and build technology. That is a scenario that can be funded. What I’m saying is, that’s not a concept financing, that is a business financing.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Tidemark CEO Christian Gheorghe (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What about the acting part?

Christian Gheorghe: They have to write back. They have to say, “Now that I understand what’s going on in my business, what can I do about it? Let me just model this particular profitability curve and change my forecast by 10% down.” You need to promote that change across the entire data cloud. There are two ways by which you can accomplish that.

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Building Fat Startups: Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In modernizing the enterprise storage using cloud principles, was there any other competitor or were you the first to come into that space?

Andres Rodriguez: When we came out, we thought we were the first but there are always competitors in the space. We have competitors today.

Sramana Mitra: Big opportunities tend to have competitors and that’s not a bad thing.

Andres Rodriguez: Absolutely. If you’re not chasing an idea that another company is chasing, you should be worried.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Tidemark CEO Christian Gheorghe (Part 4)

Christian Gheorghe: Revolutions do not just happen within an institution. They are always due to outside influence because people demand better experiences with involvement, empowerment, and engagement. The same thing is seen in the enterprise space right now. In the past, you’d always go to IT for a better report, a different report or cube, which is no longer feasible. People at the edge of the organization are demanding experiences that are self-reliant, easy to use, and that do not require the same level of reliance on IT.  With this, they can get empowered to participate on the overall performance of the business.

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Navigating The Dynamic IT Channel

The IT industry is one of the most dynamic industries where companies are under constant pressure to keep up with the rapid pace of technological advances and trends. However, information databases on IT companies aren’t always up-to-date. Therefore, navigating the IT channel to find potential channel partners to take a product to market is often a formidable challenge.

According to the latest IT spending outlook from Gartner, worldwide IT spending is projected to grow 3.1 percent over 2013 levels to reach $3.8 trillion in 2014. In 2013, spending on devices (including PCs, smartphones, mobile phones and tablets) contracted 1.2 percent to $669 billion while spending on enterprise software grew 5.2 percent to $300 billion. Small and mid-sized businesses have also become massive customers of IT products and services.

However, finding the right channel partner to tap into this $3.8 trillion IT market is a huge challenge. Database companies like DiscoverOrg and Fossa LLC have done a good job of developing specialized databases of IT buyers, but they offer no solution for breaking into the IT channel partner market.
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Building Fat Startups: Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happened next in your history?

Andres Rodriguez: After we sold Archivas, we had all the top venture capitalist wanting to fund the next project.

Sramana Mitra: I’m sure. What’s good with being an entrepreneur is, capital follows you.

Andres Rodriguez: Success breeds capital.

Sramana Mitra: However, let’s talk about the investment pieces that you explained to the investors? What year was this when you started on Nasuni?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Tidemark CEO Christian Gheorghe (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s understand Tidemark better. I think the best way for us to understand Tidemark would be through your customers. What is your target customer segment and then explain to us how you’re delivering value in Tidemark.

Christian Gheorghe: One of the main challenges our customers are trying to solve is business transformation. Sometimes by their own volition, competition, or the market environment, they are forced to transform their businesses. Now, what does that mean? The metrics by which they used to run their businesses no longer apply. They are changing because there is a greater degree of requirement to look at how the business is doing and plan and model the business on a much higher frequency. For example, moving from doing a revenue plan once a year to achieving revenue targets monthly by trying to understand the profitability.

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Building Fat Startups: Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you start Archivas?

Andres Rodriguez: Towards the end of 2001 and the beginning of 2002.

Sramana Mitra: Was it the same team that you had in Abuzz?

Andres Rodriguez: Some of the engineering team was the same, but a key ingredient was missing. This is happens often when you shift industries. With Archivas, I was moving from application layer of the stack down to the infrastructure layer of the stack. My team was exceptionally good at doing rapid amplification of distributed system layer. Now, we were going down to the storage layer, which requires a great deal of attention to quality and quality assurance.

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