Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: By the time you went to VCs, you had proof of concept, plenty of customer feedback, and you were a proven quantity as far as the VCs are concerned. I imagine raising money was not very difficult.

Ron Bianchini: Right. I loved our Series A round. We basically went back to Menlo and Norwest. They did the Series A round for Avere. They’re just incredible partners. We have John Jarve at Menlo and Matt Howard at Norwest.

Sramana Mitra: That was in 2009?

Ron Bianchini: Yes, that was in 2009.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to ship the first product?

Ron Bianchini: I believe we were shipping in 2009. We were probably a year away from beta and six months away from product. That would be my rough timeline.

Sramana Mitra: You were doing all this again in Pittsburgh?

Ron Bianchini: Yes. The company is now over 100 people. All of the engineering and marketing team is in Pittsburgh. Sales and business development executives are located wherever we need them. Corporate, engineering, marketing, and customer support personnel are all in Pittsburgh.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of your workforce are CMU graduates?

Ron Bianchini: Across engineering, between CMU, Penn State, Pitt, it’s probably a good 70% to 80% of them.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a great strategy to be next to a really good school, but not in Silicon Valley or Boston. In Silicon Valley, the talent war is unbelievably crazy right now.

Ron Bianchini: Carnegie Mellon and Pitt are the jewels of Pittsburgh.

Sramana Mitra: Anybody who knows anything about Computer Science education knows that CMU is fantastic.

Ron Bianchini: I remember when I used to do exit interviews with the kids and I can’t tell you how overwhelming it was that kids said, “I thought Pittsburgh was the armpit of America. I just spent four years here and it’s great. I just wish I can get a job here.” That was back when I was a professor. It’s just great to see that these kids have options.

Sramana Mitra: What’s going on with Avere now? You said you’re about 100 people. What are other metrics?

Ron Bianchini: I don’t think we’re at 200 customers yet. We’re somewhere between 100 and 200 customers. Maybe this quarter we’ll reach 200. Overall, we’re doing really well. We’ve not reached breakeven yet. We’re still burning a little money. We’re close to breaking even.

Sramana Mitra: How much have you raised in total?

Ron Bianchini: We’ve raised about $72 million.

Sramana Mitra: Terrific. It was really a pleasure talking to you.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey
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