From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve finished this accelerator program and you’ve got some mentors. What was your trajectory? Were you building a product first? Were you talking to customers? Where did the validation of your idea come from?

Slava Bronfman: We were a bit naive. We just started building the product. Our product is very tech-heavy. We were thinking that two guys can just build the product. We understood that it’s not the case. The right thing to do is to build a nice presentation and approach investors. We had a big mission here and we needed a lot of people to build the product.

We started to do two things. One is shaping our understanding of the vision and approaching investors and potential customers to validate our thesis. In the early days, we met a few good investors. They introduced us to a lot of customers that they have in their network before investing. Those helped to validate our solution. We pivoted a bit after each pitch.

It was a process of five months or so when we were doing a roadshow. Eventually, we raised our seed round.

Sramana Mitra: What you described is deep tech pre-seed investing. It’s particular because it’s hard to do deep-tech ventures in this traditional lean startup mode. Deep techs are often fat startups. As you pointed out, you thought you could do this MVP and get this going. But that’s not the case when you have deep tech.

Now you need to find investors who understand that they’re funding fat startups. Funding fat startups is different. The process you described is a very interesting fat startup funding process where the investors are part of the process of validation. Once both you and the customers feel comfortable about the product, then the investment comes in. You really helped me frame this.

How much did you raise?

Slava Bronfman: We raised about $2.5 million.

Sramana Mitra: When was that?

Slava Bronfman: 2016. We started the company around January and raised the seed round in June. We started hiring people. We first approached people who served with us in the army. One of the mistakes that we did is not hiring additional people on the business side. Because we are engineers and it’s on our DNA, we are very focused on the tech. We mostly hired R&D people and started building the product.

Then we started approaching customers, initially in Israel. Then we realized that there was no market in Israel. Israel is too small, so we needed to go global. I flew to the States and tried to sell the product there.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to finish the product?

Slava Bronfman: The first sale that we had was in December 2016.

Sramana Mitra: You had enough of the product to do the sale in December?

Slava Bronfman: Yes. It was minimal, but it gave good value to the customer. Around mid-2017, we completely pivoted the business.

Sramana Mitra: Before we get to the pivot, I want to check a couple of points. You were introduced to a bunch of potential customers during the 5-month roadshow. Were they all Israeli?

Slava Bronfman: All of them were US customers.

This segment is part 2 in the series : From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman
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