Conserving Cash: Veodia CEO Guillaume Cohen (Part 3)

SM: Did you have any VCs talking to you, or just the angels?

GC: At the time I took the money from the angels, I had some offers from VCs. We ended up going with the angels as it allowed us to build more value and wait to raise VC money under better terms. Angels were ready to go with a convertible note.

SM: You raised the $1.2 million on a convertible note?

GC: Yes. We gave them a warrant with a discount on the Series A.

SM: Who was advising you on the mechanics of convertible notes and such?

GC: I did everything myself. Before we closed the angel round, the guy from Stanford whom I was planning to make a co-founder with equity when I started becoming less of a garage project and more of a serious thing, said he felt it was too much for him so he left. It was OK because I had hired more people. It was perfect for the early stage.

SM: How did you know to use convertible notes?

GC: I read about them on blogs, and I learned about them from my lawyers as well.

SM: OK, so you had financing, a prototype product, and a WebEx partnership. What happened next?

GC: We closed the $1.2 million in February of 2007. Then we started getting more clients and gaining more traction. We were written up in the Financial Times and some famous blogs. Our user base grew, and I then spent a lot of time with VCs looking at a real Series A round. We closed that round in November 2007.

SM: How many customers did you have at that point?

GC: We had a few dozen. They were enterprise customers like APC, and a few smaller ones. At the time we had a wide range of use cases. We built the service and threw it out there to see how people would use it. We learned about the use cases and where the real market opportunities were. We learned there were an infinite number of ways the product was used. Churches used it to broadcast their sermons, companies used it for product managers to create training videos of their products to share with resellers, and individual bloggers used it to blog. People used it to broadcast events of their life.

We realized that to be a leader in the market we had to look at all of the use cases and identify the market opportunities. We studied the segmenting and, gathering the intelligence we had, correlated it with research. We had to make a decision whether to focus on one use case or to be an enabler of all those use cases and work with partners to build the whole product.

SM: What did you decide?

GC: We decided to become more of a platform. The potential of the core technology we have built can be delivered in so many different ways. We re-engineered the product to make it more of a platform that can empower other products that can be used for specific use cases. If you want to use video as part of your sales process, we can enable that. It can be used for internal applications and can be brought into internal CRN systems.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Conserving Cash: Veodia CEO Guillaume Cohen
1 2 3 4 5 6 7