Bootstrapping by Piggybacking: Evenica CEO Sadek Ali (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: They replaced you as the CEO.

Sadek Ali: They tried to. I was the Founder and CTO. My business partner was the CEO. They hired a CEO.

Sramana Mitra: The business got replaced by their CEO.

Sadek Ali: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: That didn’t go well.

Sadek Ali: No. The team, direction, and all the relationships that we had built up – he wasn’t able to carry those things.

Sramana Mitra: I had this happen to me. I had VCs replace me with my consent at that time. The guy we brought on didn’t work out at all.

Sadek Ali: It’s like a death spiral.

Sramana Mitra: Did you start the next company right after?

Sadek Ali: Between 2007 and 2014, I’ve always worked with the same group of people. There has been a set of people that I’ve grown up with. We’re like-minded. After the pharma play, I went to the University of Toronto and got admission for my Ph.D. work. I wanted to look into search technologies.

During that time, I realized that there were all these technologies and we had been working with the University of Toronto and their incubator. I knew everybody in the community. We started getting involved with advertising companies developing products with them.

As I was doing my Ph.D., I have been working with my former business partner, Michael Bolton, who is a long-time colleague. He had been working in e-commerce for the past 15 years. He had taken a couple of years away from his old company. He took a buyout. He waited a couple of years before working on something new. I had floated this idea of how we would do a different company than what he had built previously.

Sramana Mitra: What did you want to build at this point?

Sadek Ali: I came out of my Ph.D. and I got married. We were ready to settle down and have children. I wanted to have a startup. I wanted to attract like-minded people to my company. I wanted to have a company that had a lot of culture. I wanted to be able to take the time to find the right ideas. With any startup, you take that technology and you change your business on a dime. At that point, I wanted to explore the business problems. We knew that there’s going to be an evolution in e-commerce.

Sramana Mitra: You wanted to do something in e-commerce. You have constrained your search within the e-commerce domain?

Sadek Ali: Correct. We knew some generalities about it, but we wanted to work with customers this time. We wanted to work directly with partners who wanted to support e-commerce and not necessarily e-commerce players. You’re doing that for two reasons. One is I don’t want to share my IP. We were going to do something different, but I don’t know what that difference is yet.

We ended up raising a bit of money. It was in the tens of thousands of dollars. We had some connections where we could buy a few customers. That was the investment that went into this new company. It was $50,000 to $100,000 to buy the rights to some contracts which someone didn’t want. We would have to then support those contracts. We hired one new person to help us to work these contracts.

Sramana Mitra: These are supporting e-commerce merchants?

Sadek Ali: These are companies that had an e-commerce system that needed to be supported. They’re on the small enterprise side.

Sramana Mitra: They were building their e-commerce shops on what platform?

Sadek Ali: They would be using things like Magento or Shopify.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping by Piggybacking: Evenica CEO Sadek Ali
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