From an EIR Experiment to a Fast Growth SaaS Company: Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth (Part 2)

Joe Kinsella: From there, I decided that I wanted to start a business. I started a company called Tarragon. I wanted to build out a tools business. It ended up being more of a consulting services business. I wasn’t able to balance the consulting and software side. I built a small team of people. We would build backend infrastructure for the fast-growing dot-com businesses. I did that for several years.

I do combined equity deals with companies. Some of them are successful and some are moderately successful. There were some that were not so successful. It was a great experience. From there, one of my clients was a company called Silverback Technologies. >>>

From an EIR Experiment to a Fast Growth SaaS Company: Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Joe founded CloudHealth as an EIR at a Boston VC firm. Last year the SaaS company had 300 customers. The story explores how he achieved product market fit and found its stride.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Joe Kinsella: I grew up in a little town outside of Syracuse, New York. It’s just a little urban town out in the middle of nowhere. I spent my life right through college in the New York area. I took a Computer Science degree. I noticed that there were a lot of tech companies in Boston and San Francisco. I put a lot of thought into it and decided to head out to Boston and started looking for a job. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Snehal Fulzele, CEO of Cloud Lending (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How do you charge?

Snehal Fulzele: We have a stack of business models. It’s a flat fee per user per month. It depends on how many modules they purchase because we offer an entire end-to-end lending suite which covers not only origination, but along with that, we also cover underwriting. This is true for traditional finance companies. They are legacy servicing platforms, but they want to revamp their borrower experience. In that case, they will just got for the origination and the underwriting application.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Give me a ballpark. If I’m an online lending institution, what are we talking about? What’s the range? Are we talking $1,000 a month or $10,000 a month. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Snehal Fulzele, CEO of Cloud Lending (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: One thing that I find curious is that you have 85 customers and they are all online lenders. How many online lenders are there right now?

Snehal Fulzele: We are a global company. Half of our customers are in the US. It started in the UK and US, and we are seeing a lot of online lending in countries like China. There are about 3,000 companies in China. It’s happening in Australia. If you add the crowdfunding platforms in the US alone, there are about 400 of them, which spans across not only loans, but also equity platforms as well.

Sramana Mitra: You don’t just deal with lending. You also deal with equity crowdfunding due diligence? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Thycotic James Legg CEO and Jonathan Cogley (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The value proposition is still password management?

Jonathan Cogley: It’s a password vault but it’s really to prevent external or insider threats.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about what is the competitive landscape. This is a crowded space. What is the competitive landscape that you see around your product?

Jonathan Cogley: The space is getting crowded because there’s a bunch of people who are a little bit late to the party. Some of the big vendors are coming in. They’re trying to either acquire small startups that aren’t necessarily that successful and throw their weight behind it. One of the reasons we are able to succeed is due to the fact that we are a pure-play vendor. We don’t do anything else. CA is in the space too but they’ve entered recently. It’s much easier to beat them in deals because the customer can quickly see that this is not CA’s core focus whereas Thycotic has been doing this for 12 years. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Snehal Fulzele, CEO of Cloud Lending (Part 2)

Snehal Fulzele: Let’s take a use case. Many of our customers are online lenders or online fintech lenders. If I were to give you a simplified use case, we have a bunch of customers who do online small business lending. As a small business owner, you go to a website perhaps on a mobile phone and you’re filling up the application.

In the good old days of banking, you would probably walk into a brick-and-mortar branch. You’d fill up an application and give your SS number. As a business owner, you will perhaps give hard copy financial statements. After maybe two to four weeks, you get an approval or a rejection. You don’t really have visibility into what’s going on and how they’re using your information. The next generation use case is you start an application on your mobile phone. Let’s say you’re looking for a working capital loan. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Thycotic James Legg CEO and Jonathan Cogley (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was that product that was the beginning of your transition from services to a product company?

Jonathan Cogley: The product’s name is called Secret Server. The simplest way to think about it is, if you think as an individual, all the passwords that you have are so many. They’re difficult to manage. There are some that don’t directly matter to you. We call them non-human passwords. You even have a few examples as a consumer.

If you think about the WiFi router at home, it doesn’t really belong to you but you need to know it and you need to keep it secure. If you think about that router, you need to know the admin password if you want to go in and change the specific settings for your home network. You need to know those credentials. If you roll that out to the IT department in an enterprise, they have those passwords except they are thousands of them. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Snehal Fulzele, CEO of Cloud Lending (Part 1)

You’ve read our coverage of online lending vendors like Kabbage, OnDeck, Lending Club, etc. Here, we cover a story of how ALL online lending vendors (including banks) will soon become much more customer-centric, equipped with technology for fast decision-making and rapid processing of loan applications. Important trends in the industry. >>>