A Serial “Data” Entrepreneur’s Journey: Bassel Ojjeh, CEO of LigaData (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Who were buying at this point when you were doing this company in the early 2000s?

Bassel Ojjeh: I left Yahoo in 2009 and started what I just mentioned to you. That was from 2009 to 2010 onwards. Financial industry, banking, and mobile operators were buying at this point.

Along the way, big data became important. We’re dealing with massive amounts of data that cannot be processed or managed by traditional data management companies, so they had to go build their own technology.

That, along with open source, made those technologies available to the likes of banks and telecommunication and healthcare companies.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit more about the mechanics of building this company. Did you bootstrap?

Bassel Ojjeh: We raised a round of funding from an investor up in Seattle who also had bootstrapped his own company. We got one round of funding for $2.5 million. 

Sramana Mitra: How much were you able to get to revenue-wise with this funding?

Bassel Ojjeh: Throughout the course, we generated about $50 million. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s chase that journey a little bit. $2.5 million gets you to what milestone?

Bassel Ojjeh: We wanted to do two things. We wanted to sustain ourselves. We would like to do only one round of funding. Because of our background in the data world, we want to go ahead and start delivering services while we’re building a product. We wanted to do both at the same time. Any VC would probably advise against it.

Sramana Mitra: In our program, we use Bootstrapping Using Services as one of the methodologies of building companies.

Bassel Ojjeh: I totally agree with you. That’s great. 

Sramana Mitra: We’ve seen case study after case study of entrepreneurs building wonderful companies using that methodology.

Bassel Ojjeh: VCs always see that as a distraction. Being in Silicon Valley, what we’re doing is contrary to the culture here which is just go raise as much as you can and keep building the product. Either crash and burn or make it big. It’s okay if you’re a VC and there are crashes and burns. If you’re an entrepreneur, you only have one shot.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like your early customers were services customers that helped you scope out and productize this.

Bassel Ojjeh: We narrowed ourselves around what we wanted to do. It wasn’t so broad. We knew what that first product was going to be. You look at databases. How much can you consume and how fast? At the end of the day, that data sits and waits for a human to make a decision.

Since we’re going through a transformation where most of the data now is generated from devices, it’s almost like you want to eliminate the decision that’s dependent on a human and really build a system or product to enable automated decisions. That became our first product.

This segment is part 3 in the series : A Serial “Data” Entrepreneur’s Journey: Bassel Ojjeh, CEO of LigaData
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