Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year was this happening?

Mikko Valimaki: This happened in 2008.

Sramana Mitra: The first order of business was to get an open source product going right?

Mikko Valimaki: We thought this whole thing through and we figured out that it cannot be a big enough business for us to grow this company really big. One of the first things we did was figuring out a company name. This current name Tuxera was launched in 2009. At the same time, we did two other things. After spending several months with Microsoft, we finally made this background IP license with Microsoft so that we could legally develop Microsoft filesystems.

Microsoft has some background patents here on platforms other than Windows, so we could develop it on Linux, Android, and other platforms. We also started to develop other filesystems. At that point, there was a Microsoft filesystem called exFAT. It was a new version of this very popular FAT filesystem. We were the first company that got the rights to develop that. We decided that the company name cannot be based on one filesystem. We were doing to do all filesystems. Actually, we are defining ourselves as one of these data storage companies.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take it step by step. We are doing an entrepreneur journey story. When you started the company in 2008, how long did it take you to get the first product out onto the open source platform? I know you went through various modifications of that strategy in due course but I’d like to take it in sequence.

Mikko Valimaki: When the company was formally started, the product was already out there. The open source product was out there. It was released in 2006. There were some requests coming for the website. My co-founder was maintaining the website and he was answering these people and helping them.

From this activity, we figured out how to charge and tried to build a product based on this existing open source project. We made another version of the filesystem which has more features but is close-sourced. We were able to build a product based on this initial free product.

Sramana Mitra: You keep jumping way further. I need it to be an entrepreneurial journey. I need to understand the timeframe. It sounds like that in 2008, you already had an open source project going? When you and your technical co-founder came together, what were the first things that you did?

Mikko Valimaki: We started to look at this open source project website’s statistics, which was a non-commercial website. We looked at those data. We figured out that there were already several companies asking for help and support. This was the first realization.

Sramana Mitra: These people who were asking for support that you were able to identify, were they willing to pay?

Mikko Valimaki: At that point, they weren’t willing to pay because they were thinking that it was an open source project. Nobody was willing to pay anything for that. For that purpose, we had to revise the website. We had to generate agreements. We had to make it look like a company, which it wasn’t at that point.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Helsinki, Finland: Mikko Valimaki, CEO of Tuxera
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