Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Don Mal, CEO of Vena Solutions (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Excel has huge training out there. People know how to use Excel. From a user adoption point of view, Excel-based interface would have a much bigger adoption.

Don Mal: My favorite line is that only Facebook has as many users.

Sramana Mitra: How much money did you raise?

Don Mal: We raised $1.3 million. We originally set out to raise $1 million because we felt that we needed that to start a company,but we were oversubscribed.

Sramana Mitra: This was from angels?

Don Mal: Friends and families but angels as well.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a friends and family round that you valued at $10 million. Friends and family rounds tend to be a little bit different than professional investors. A friends and family is a very doable round especially with your kind of background. What happens next? What year are we talking? 2011?

Don Mal: Yes. We hired 20 people. We got a space. In our first year, we signed 20 customers.

Sramana Mitra: Is this a SaaS product?

Don Mal: It’s SaaS.

Sramana Mitra: What was the price point?

Don Mal: We were getting about $2,000 per user per year.

Sramana Mitra: Was it a mid-market product? Was it an enterprise product?

Don Mal: For our first ten customers, we were doing whatever we needed to do to get deals and customers. It was a combination of mid-market and enterprise customers. We picked up some pretty big brands.

Sramana Mitra: What revenue level did you get to in that first year?

Don Mal: About a million dollars.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next inflection point?

Don Mal: We had 20 customers. We needed more money. Then we did an angel round. We raised about $3.5 million.

Sramana Mitra: What year was that?

Don Mal: That would be 2012. A year later, we raised $3 plus million from a group of angels. We were able to hire more people and move to a new office. We moved to a real office building.

Sramana Mitra: That’s when your no-soliciation was over.

Don Mal: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Were these enterprise customers large?

Don Mal: I would say half and half.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you do in 2013 and 2014?

Don Mal: Now we’re probably $3 million.

Sramana Mitra: In 2013.

Don Mal: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Then in 2014.

Don Mal: $7 million.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like a relatively standard enterprise software trajectory.

Don Mal: I think so. We’re getting closer to $40 million now. It’s a nice smooth curve. We published this as well. We’ve had better than 100% year on year growth for five years straight.

Sramana Mitra: Have you raised more money besides the first angel round?

Don Mal: After that, we did some debt financing. We raised another $3 plus million. Then follow-on angel rounds. Last year, we raised almost $30 million in a proper Series A round.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Don Mal, CEO of Vena Solutions
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