Bootstrapping All The Way: Infinitely Virtual CEO Adam Stern (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Did you continue to bootstrap the company, or did you, at this point, introduce financing?

Adam Stern: Early on, we financed purchases. Then we decided that from a cash flow perspective, it made a lot of sense to lease equipment. Our storage equipment, switches, and routers were leased. We only stopped leasing equipment a year and a half ago. The decision was made by the Board that future purchases will be financed out of revenue. Even now, we’re not going to pick up more leasing. We want the balance sheet to look very strong.

Sramana Mitra: The full company is revenue-financed. You did some amount of equipment financing earlier on but now, you’re not.

Adam Stern: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic. Where are you in terms of revenues in 2014?

Adam Stern: We’re not publishing our current revenue level but we grew to almost 30% last year. We’re projecting similar growth again this year.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you trying to grow from here in terms of aspirations and strategies?

Adam Stern: Right now, we’re focused on some new verticals. While the business is not necessarily vertically-driven, we’ve always been able to host for every kind of business. We’ve experienced easy growth in the financial services businesses. Right now from a PR and marketing perspective, we are attempting to gain some traction in manufacturing and services. We’re trying to speak to the healthcare business about how to use our environment to move their applications into the cloud. We’ve been very successful in different spaces.

Sramana Mitra: The go-to market strategy is still VAR-driven?

Adam Stern: Not really. We do have resellers and they do a lot of sales. We, generally, do direct sales to customers. We’re going to be pushing through with the digital magazine. It’s more about informing possible customers than selling to them. We don’t use a lot of marketing dollars. We, instead, try to teach our prospective customers the value of getting into our hosting environment. We’re just going to try to get people to understand the value that Infinitely Virtual brings to their specific industry.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping All The Way: Infinitely Virtual CEO Adam Stern
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