Building Fat Startups: Delphix CEO Jedidiah Yueh (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: One thing about these large VCs is that a first-time entrepreneur with no background in a particular technology area has absolutely no chance of raising money from a large VC today for a fat startup.

Jedidiah Yueh: I managed to do it as an English major in 2000.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, it’s a very unusual scenario and it happened in 2000. I can guarantee you it’s not going to happen today. Part of it is because the market is full of experienced entrepreneurs and experienced technologists who are doing things. If you have no background, you’re going to be competing with that set.

There are all sorts of people who are bootstrapping heavily right now including bootstrapping using services. Even for heavy infrastructure products, you see quite a lot of building done before they go out to raise money. It’s becoming rarer and rarer that people invest in first-time entrepreneurs. Fat startups for first-time entrepreneurs is becoming rarer.

Jedidiah Yueh: I think the market is overfunded for fat enterprise startups because there’s too much capital available. There’s certainly quite a large number of experienced entrepreneurs who are repeating as serial entrepreneurs but I still think that if you have a compelling enough idea, it doesn’t really matter who you are. You should be able to get funded in today’s world.

Sramana Mitra: In theory, that is great; but in practice, it’s not happening. I don’t want to mislead our audience by saying that you should go down that path, and it’s going to happen magically. It’s not going to happen that easily.

Jedidiah Yueh: I understand what you mean. I agree it’s not easy but it’s not impossible either.

Sramana Mitra: How far along are you now?

Jedidiah Yueh: Delphix is a $100 million revenue company. We have many of the world’s largest corporations as our customers. We’ve been around for 10 years now.

Sramana Mitra: What do you plan to do? Are you ready to go public? It’s a reasonable threshold to go out.

Jedidiah Yueh: The plan is to build a big public enterprise software company.

Sramana Mitra: Do you have any timeline in mind at which you’re looking at an IPO.

Jedidiah Yueh: We don’t have a timeline set for an IPO yet.

Sramana Mitra: I think I’ve got your story. It was a good discussion.

Jedidiah Yueh: The only other thing I’d add is, I wrote a book called Disrupt or Die. It shares a lot of the frameworks that I’ve learned in building my software company over the years. The book has a similar mission to yours. It’s about democratizing innovation and trying to enable more technical opportunities for people around the world rather than concentrating everything in Silicon Valley.

Sramana Mitra: Great! Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Building Fat Startups: Delphix CEO Jedidiah Yueh
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