Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You can’t have everything. You have to choose. What year does that bring us up to?

Gaurav Rewari: In early 2000, I decided to do another startup in the consumer space. It was a company called FirstRain, named after the Indian monsoon season. I have memories of staring out at torrential rain and the relief it brought to arid lands. The idea was to try and harvest the web for information that may be useful for some vertical domains. It was a vertical search play. Of course, 2000 turned out to be a completely different time. This was the early part of 2000 with respect to technology markets. I started with some colleague from MicroStrategy and some professors from Princeton and Yale but very quickly realized that we needed to go back to the drawing board and reinvent ourselves, which we did, as an enterprise focus play.

Sramana Mitra: I’m aware of that. We had Penny. She related that story on the repositioning.

Gaurav Rewari: She joined in 2005. The repositioning began in 2001. The idea was to save the same core technology that could be used to crawl the web for a vertical area like collecting resumes. What if you could have that same focused information gathering for market intelligence and competitive intelligence? That might be valuable to a marketing department that wants to keep track of competing products.

Sramana Mitra: Sales prospecting.

Gaurav Rewari: That’s exactly right. That’s the other use case for that. We started getting into the business use of vertical search. We saw initial traction and got early customers. Then we brought on board Penny. She joined in 2005 as the CEO. That’s when I moved out west.

Sramana Mitra: FirstRain was not a San Jose company?

Gaurav Rewari: No. It was based in Manhattan. That was a very interesting experience because it was a case where we really had to go back to the drawing board and reinvent ourselves. The financing climate was very difficult. We were able to raise multiple rounds and then transitioned the company into a mode that prepared it for the next phase of growth. I stayed on at FirstRain as the Chief Strategy Officer for a couple of years and then decided that I wanted to get back to my BI roots.

At that time, I started looking around. Oracle was a company I found to be very interestingly poised in the analytics market. They have made a set of acquisitions. They’ve acquired their Oracle Business Intelligence through the acquisition of Siebel. At the same time, they bought Hyperion. I knew of course that they had a very large data warehousing franchise. I thought it would be a wonderful experience to join Oracle and see what it was like to be in the belly of a very large organization where you can’t influence the outcome through one or two diving catches. You can really influence the outcome through careful instrumentation of the machine.

That turned out to be a great experience for me. I started off heading Product Strategy for Hyperion. I got to learn the financial performance management space and analytics for the office of the CFO. Over time, I came to head the Product Management for the entire business analytics portfolio, which at $2.5 billion is a very sizeable business. Though in the context of Oracle, it’s a very small business. That was a great learning experience for me – understanding how it is that one can take a fairly vast product line and identify the key drivers of growth, create unified coherence across all the product lines, and really make it more comprehensible for customers.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify
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