Conserving Cash: Veodia CEO Guillaume Cohen (Part 4)

SM: Can you give me an example of an application Veodia is supporting?

GC: We built a plug-in for Clearspace that allows you to record a video from within Clearspace. Any employee can create video and share it internally with other employees, as well as sharing or receiving videos from clients. It makes video a casual part of all business communications. We call ourselves an agile video platform that empowers people to use video as part of their daily communications.

SM: To do that you need partnerships with the people who are going to do the actual applications.

GC: Absolutely. Obviously the first one was with WebEx, and the most recent was with Jive Software. We have more in the works.

SM: How much of this thinking and decision making was done when you raised your VC round?

GC: Not that much. We were honest with them up front and told them what we had identified as use cases. We told them we were in the process of working through and identifying them. What was important for the investors was seeing the huge potential in the technology and seeing all of the different use cases it could be applied to. They had faith that we could figure it out, and we understood what the important things were in evaluating the markets. We chose to focus on the right things first.

SM: How much did you raise in the VC round?

GC: With the note it totaled up to $8.3 million Series A.

SM: Who were the VCs?

GC: It was Clearstone Ventures. They backed PayPal and a bunch of other great companies. We also had D.E. Shaw, which also has a venture capital group.

SM: There is more of that going on. Hedge funds are increasingly getting involved in venture. How did they find you?

GC: It was a personal connection, I knew someone there. They have a large fund set aside for VC, and the hired partners from existing VC groups in the Valley.

SM: Was there a difference in your dealings with Clearstone, a traditional firm, than in your dealings with D.E. Shaw?

GC: D.E. Shaw has slightly more compliance requirements in terms of financial reporting. In terms of negotiating term sheets, it was not much different.

SM: In November of 2007 you raised the financing round. What happened next?

GC: The reason we raised that money was to build the engineering team. We did that and invested more in the core technology. We did the re-engineering necessary to support our core strategy of being a platform.

SM: Is that re-engineering done?

GC: Yes.

SM: Are people using it?

GC: Yes. Sun Microsystems is going to deploy us as part of their internal learning system. They are going to enable all of their employees the ability to create videos. They are going to harvest and capture every bit of knowledge their employees have in video and then share it with other employees, and potentially an external audience as well. That is part of the movement hitting the enterprise 2.0/3.0 area. Communication is changing internally and externally. We are very much a part of that movement. We won the Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad Competition in Boston. We bring the video component to it. We bring the human aspect to it. We do it in a way that is easy and can be used by any employee.

There is no need for centralized video production. It is also done in a way that is compatible with enterprise requirements, which is important. Our platform is for the enterprise, which is not the case for most consumer services you can find. Enterprises want things like the ability to integrate with their existing infrastructure, single sign-on, APIs, and security and some level of control. They want very high visual quality. YouTube quality is not acceptable for an enterprise, even in casual use. If your COO wants to use it, he wants to look good.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Conserving Cash: Veodia CEO Guillaume Cohen
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