From Y Combinator to Customer Traction and $50 Million in Financing: MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is the go-to market strategy?

Eric Frenkiel: We started the company with zero code. Since we had that ability to focus on what we wanted to build into the product, we’ve been able to build enterprise-grade features into MemSQL in a very short period of time. Our hurried go-to market strategy is building our field teams to sell to our most likely customers in the Fortune 500 segment that need high performance solutions for their problems.

Sramana Mitra: You went to YCombinator in 2010?

Eric Frenkiel: We started in the winter of 2011 class, which kicked off at the beginning of 2011.

Sramana Mitra: What did you accomplish after YCombinator?

Eric Frenkiel: We were one of the first enterprise startups to join YCombinator. YCombinator is traditionally a consumer-oriented startup accelerator. We wanted to join because it would enable us to build a network around investors that would ultimately back the company.

I left Facebook on a Friday. That weekend was full of uncertainty and questions for me. Naturally, you plan and you make sure that there’s always an immediate goal. The very next Monday, I met with our first investor. We talked for 20 minutes and we walked out with a $200,000 check. I was literally floating on air after that because that was the first step in building a company.

Sramana Mitra: You were doing this outside of YCombinator?

Eric Frenkiel: It’s part of the YCombinator program. Effectively, you join YCombinator and you attend weekly dinners and you have office hours. Outside of that, you should be fundraising. My promise to Nikita was that I was going to get us enough runway to build the company. He promised me that he could build a database. The very first meeting I had was with an investor that wrote a $200,000 check for us based on our idea and team.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to get to the minimum viable product (MVP)?

Eric Frenkiel: I’ll finish up on the YCombinator experience. By the time YCombinator concluded, we had raised $2.1 million in a seed round. We were very quick to build proof of execution. We helped another company in the YCombinator class and scaled their business from zero to 20 million pages in six weeks.

To answer your question about how long it took to get to the MVP, it took 18 months of solid stealth-mode operations. We launched the first version of MemSQL in June 2012. Well before then, we had already been able to build software that worked with limited customer engagement and access. We booked our first six-figure deal eight months into starting the company. That fulfilled my obligation to ensure that we weren’t building in a vacuum. We wanted to have real-world problems that we can solve.

By the summer of 2011, we had signed our first six-figure deal with another company that needed to scale. That product was no less than Lady Gaga’s social network called LittleMonsters.com. It was a lot of fun because when she tweeted out that anyone could now join that social network, it was literal bombardment of traffic into their website. That entire website was sustained by one MemSQL machine.

This segment is part 4 in the series : From Y Combinator to Customer Traction and $50 Million in Financing: MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel
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