From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: David Moss, Co-Founder, President and CTO of People Power Company (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Your Series A was mostly angels?

David Moss: There were some traditional VCs in Series A as well.

Sramana Mitra: What was the size of the Series A?

David Moss: I think it was around $4 million. With Series B, we filled it out with more corporate investors. They also turned into customers.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of milestones, at what point of this evolution did Series A happen?

David Moss: It happened around 2011. We ended up closing it in several parts. As we get new investors in, we would close part of the round and then continue on with a Series A1 for example.

Sramana Mitra: Bottom line is, the point at which the set of Series A happened, you were still doing services businesses for your B2B partners while still looking for a venture-scale product idea to build around.

David Moss: Yes. Being able to articulate that vision is critical. When you’re at a Series A-sized company, you may not have it all figured out. That overarching mission and vision gets people on board.

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to contradict you on this. The only reason that you succeeded in raising money, at that point, without a venture scale idea fully fleshed out was because Gene was part of your team. If you were alone trying to bootstrap your way through this journey, you would not have gotten financing.

David Moss: That is right.

Sramana Mitra: There are two routes. A developer can pair up with an experienced entrepreneur and build something. That will have more fundability upfront because of the credibility of a serial entrepreneur. We know lots of entrepreneurs who are doing it first time themselves as the Founder CEO, but you have to find your venture-scale idea and validate your idea.

David Moss: Right.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve seen this other path – the one that you described. That’s a reasonable path to becoming a successful entrepreneur as well.

David Moss: Bringing in money is part of it; managing your expense is the other half. One of the attributes that has helped People Power is that we are a very cash-efficient company. A lot of us look at the market today. Many people who would be looking at 1Mby1M would be the types of people who can get a real cushy salary at a huge company. That’s not what motivates us. We want to change the world. The status quo isn’t good enough.

Having that mission attracts like-minded people where salary is not the most important thing. It’s more about the mission. We have been able to keep our burn rate low. We are not able to pay salaries that would compete with Microsoft or Amazon, but we are able to attract the best talent who want to change the world.

Sramana Mitra: One of the things that we are doing a lot of, which is quite a contrarian position, is we encourage bootstrapping with a paycheck. A lot of developers and engineers who have those cushy jobs can work with 1Mby1M and learn how to build a business and start validating an idea. Once that is at a point where it’s starting to look like you can generate revenues out of, then they can quit.

It’s very unpopular, by the way, in the traditional venture world. In the journey of an entrepreneur, bills have to be paid. As a pragmatic person, I acknowledge that. Let them keep their jobs. In a large company, developer jobs have lots of downtime that you can be productive with.

David Moss: I agree. That’s how many of us started at People Power. We maintain a full-time job and work part-time.

Sramana Mitra: I really enjoyed speaking with you. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: David Moss, Co-Founder, President and CTO of People Power Company
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