Bootstrap to $25 Million from Utah, Raise Money Later to Scale to $100 Million: John Pope, CEO of Jive (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What did this $21 million, which you raised, enable you to do that you couldn’t have done organically?

John Pope: Not all of it was direct. We had some secondary in there. Out of respect to the guy who moved on, I won’t say exactly how much. The funding that we used as a company went mostly towards building out a world-class platform. In communications, even more so in a lot of other cloud services, uptime is paramount. If a website isn’t available for a few minutes, people don’t stress too much.

If you’re on a phone call and there’s a disruption, that is a potential revenue killer. We realized that our service is incredibly critical to the operation of our customers’ businesses. We wanted to build a world-class platform. We brought on teams with deep industry experience and set out to do something that nobody had done before. We set out to hit five 9s from a cloud telephony platform perspective.

We realized that if we were going to move upmarket, we were going to have to satisfy the expectation of a much larger client whose job might be on the line and whose career path would be affected positively or negatively depending on our product’s performance. We scaled our vertical and our indirect channel programs as well. We felt like building a world-class five 9s type of unified communication.

Sramana Mitra: Was there anything that evolved or morphed on the marketing and customer  acquisition strategy side that is worth discussing?

John Pope: Pertaining to the investment?

Sramana Mitra: In general. In the post-2013 timeframe, you had another three years. You said you’re already at a $100 million run rate.

John Pope: We’re not there but we’re close. We have this bootstrapped type of culture. It was the anti-hype machine. It touches on what we talked about earlier. Everybody celebrating because they raised money.

Sramana Mitra: It’s so incredibly annoying.

John Pope: Yes, it’s extremely unhealthy and discouraging to 99% of the entrepreneurs out there. We just had a lot of pride in the fact that we had bootstrapped it. All the companies that got funding out of the gate tried to create this persona that wasn’t really backed up by operational excellence. They had been doing a lot of PR work.

We had to add that later on. We were much more successful than the industry and the analysts really knew. We snuck up on everybody. That’s a different story. As I put it, it’s more of a blue-collar entrepreneurship where you want your work to show.

Sramana Mitra: Don’t do yourself the disservice and the dishonor of calling this blue-collar entrepreneurship. This is real entrepreneurship and you deserve huge respect for that. The rest is complete bullshit.

John Pope: I agree with you.

Sramana Mitra: Our philosophy is entrepreneurship equals customers, revenues, and profits. Financing and exit is optional.

John Pope: Exactly. We never had a next strategy. I don’t know how many people came up and asked what’s our exit strategy. I say, “We have an opportunity and we’re going to take advantage of it. We’ll bring jobs. We’ll bring efficiency to our customers.” None of us felt like having an exit strategy or depending on funding.

Sramana Mitra: Great. I love your story and we look forward to publishing it. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Bootstrap to $25 Million from Utah, Raise Money Later to Scale to $100 Million: John Pope, CEO of Jive
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