Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry (Part 1)

Chrome River is successfully taking on Concur (now SAP) in the expense reporting SaaS space. Find out how.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Dave Terry: I was born in Texas. I went to school at the University of Texas. I have a degree in Computer Science and Math. I came out of college spinning the propeller on my head. I was a program developer and moved to software programming field.

Sramana Mitra: What year was that?

Dave Terry: This was 1987. I began developing software. My first job was in programming. Fortunately, I fell into a job where I was developing software for large ERP systems for law firms. There was this company out of Dallas that was doing that. I was a software developer developing back-end, time billing, financial management, and AP automation for large law firms around the globe. >>>

Scaling an Analytics Services Business to $30 Million: Axtria CEO Jaswinder Chadha (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click on that a bit. You founded marketRx in which year?

Jaswinder Chadha: In 2000.

Sramana Mitra: You self-financed that project?

Jaswinder Chadha: No. The first round of financing was friends and family. We did another round of financing from angel investors. The third round was when we brought in a group by the name of Westbridge Capital in Bangalore, which eventually became Sequoia India.

Sramana Mitra: I know Westbridge really well actually. What was the stage? You launched the company with some friends and family money. What was the next step? What kind of customer traction were you able to get before getting the angel money? >>>

Scaling an Analytics Services Business to $30 Million: Axtria CEO Jaswinder Chadha (Part 1)

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

Outsourced analytics services has been a popular category, especially in the US-India mode. Jaswinder has built not one, but two of these businesses.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Jaswinder Chadha: I grew up in Punjab, India. My father was in the army, so I was born in the military hospital. My mom was a professor at a university. I spent most of my childhood at the army base because my dad was getting posted all over the country. It was more of a stable base for us to get our education. I graduated from IIT – Delhi and came to the US in 1990 for graduate studies. Then, I ended up going for Ph.D. as well. I went to Texas A&M. That has been my foundation in education before I jumped into the business world.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do right after your Ph.D.? What was the next step? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: CipherCloud CEO Pravin Kothari (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I understand what you’re doing. I’m going to ask you to do something for me. You have been in security for a long time. You said you’ve done four companies. Security is a domain where you can only do a startup if you really are a domain expert. When you look around at the current situation in terms of where we are in the industry of the Internet, cloud, and mobile, what are open problems that have caught your eye? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: CipherCloud CEO Pravin Kothari (Part 4)

Pravin Kothari: We can actually do encryption of the data in such a way that every country’s compliance requirements can be met. The encryption keys are always in the country. It will never traverse the cloud provider side. The issue with cloud provider security is that even if they do encryption, encryption keys are always with them. Customers cannot keep it. That breaks all the requirements that we talked about. Data cannot go out of the country. Security concerns include insider threat. Even though the policies say they cannot look at the data, they can. They have the keys. They have the data. They can open it up. They can do that. The major concern right now is around public cloud. Even though network security is provided by cloud providers, they are not able to address the real pain point that customers have.

Sramana Mitra: In the scenarios that you’re painting like the password breach vis-à-vis Box, how can you handle that? Let’s say you have a client who’s a Box user and Box does something that exposes these vulnerabilities. How do you tackle that on behalf of your client? >>>

Bootstrapping All The Way: Infinitely Virtual CEO Adam Stern (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of the competition, when you started tinkering with virtualization in 2005, it was lesser known and everything was immature. Today, it’s mainstream and well-penetrated. What is your experience of the evolution of the competitive landscape in the market?

Adam Stern: It’s mainstream in that people know what cloud means. Quite often, I have conversations with decision makers and I tell them what we do. They’re dumbstruck. When people think of cloud, they think of what their iPad or their iPhone does. They think Box.com or Dropbox, but the concept of running their business applications from machines that are hosted on a virtualized infrastructure is still very foreign to a lot of people. The reason is that the push in the industry right now is very consumer-oriented. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: CipherCloud CEO Pravin Kothari (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What are the trends in that? I would think that the public cloud vendors – people who provide SaaS as their core business – isn’t it their responsibility to make sure that they’re providing their data and applications in a secure way?

Pravin Kothari: That’s a great question. Every cloud provider like Microsoft, Google, or Salesforce has security. For example last year, ZenDesk got compromised and their customers’ data got stolen. DropBox forgot to check passwords just 18 months ago where they pushed the release build out and did not check the password. During that time, we don’t know how many people can access your documents. Even though they provide network security, there can be issues that can allow hackers to access information. That’s the issue with all these cloud providers. They are doing a reasonably good job, but that may not always be perfect. >>>

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? >>>