From an EIR Experiment to a Fast Growth SaaS Company: Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth (Part 2)

Joe Kinsella: From there, I decided that I wanted to start a business. I started a company called Tarragon. I wanted to build out a tools business. It ended up being more of a consulting services business. I wasn’t able to balance the consulting and software side. I built a small team of people. We would build backend infrastructure for the fast-growing dot-com businesses. I did that for several years.

I do combined equity deals with companies. Some of them are successful and some are moderately successful. There were some that were not so successful. It was a great experience. From there, one of my clients was a company called Silverback Technologies. They were an early customer. I worked with them for a while and they finally convinced me to come on board and join them. They were a startup that provided remote management to MSPs. It was an emerging market and MSPs weren’t even called MSPs at that time. I did that for a number of years.

I eventually became VP of Engineering there. It was a company that had started right at the end of the dot-com boom. It was one of those crossovers. I’m sure you remember those days where everything was great, and then everything was dark for a period of time. We managed to build a pretty successful business. It was a struggle in those years. People weren’t just buying that product then.

Our  growth was definitely well-earned and took a lot of effort. Several of the engineers were my founding engineers. Our COO and CEO all worked together at Silverback. We did some great technical work and we achieved quite a bit. Ultimately, we reached a point where we realized that the best path was an acquisition. We were acquired by Dell.

Sramana Mitra: You did this consulting company and you had a bunch of dot-coms as clients. You structured them as cash equity split deals. First and foremost, what years are we talking?

Joe Kinsella: FireFly was in 1995. I think I started this in 1997. I ended up doing it through 2000. That was when I shut the company down and transitioned into Silverback.

Sramana Mitra: You shut it down, but what was the structure of the equity you took. Did you take equity personally? Did you take equity in the name of the company?

Joe Kinsella: I took equity personally on those deals.

Sramana Mitra: Did that equity amount to anything?

Joe Kinsella: It did. One of my clients, for example, was Emode. It ended up being renamed to Tickle. There were few exits like that where I’ve done decent deals. It was modestly successful. It wasn’t wildly successful. There were some that were complete busts.

Sramana Mitra: If you sum it up, what kind of denomination did that equity sum up to?

Joe Kinsella: It was somewhere around under $200,000.

Sramana Mitra: Then you chose to join Silverback who was one of your clients.

Joe Kinsella: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: That was in 2001?

Joe Kinsella: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay there?

Joe Kinsella: Dell acquired Silverback in 2007, so it was around seven years.

This segment is part 2 in the series : From an EIR Experiment to a Fast Growth SaaS Company: Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth
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