Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: CipherCloud CEO Pravin Kothari (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me actually double-click down. Our audience is very sophisticated. We’ve covered Palo Alto Networks for a long time and very intensely. We’ve covered FireEye for a long time. Let’s try to put it all in some sort of an ecosystem map. In your worldview, where does FireEye sit? Where does Palo Alto sit vis-a-vis CipherCloud?

Pravin Kothari: Definitely. I was just coming down to that. There is a need for security in endpoint like mobile devices, desktops, and servers. There is a need for security in the network. There is a need for security in the enterprise like Symantec. There is also a need for security in the cloud. The whole IT infrastructure is shifting towards cloud. Right now, I would say the tipping point is going to happen in a couple of years where more applications are going to be deployed in cloud than on premise. There is an increasing need for building security for the cloud. This is an area that CipherCloud focuses on – cloud security. >>>

Bootstrapping All The Way: Infinitely Virtual CEO Adam Stern (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit more about what was in the product.

Adam Stern: In the very early days, we were focused on terminal server environments and delivering Windows virtual machines to do web and SQL-based workloads. We did offer people the flexibility of building their own environments. They couldn’t build their own virtual machines. They had to rely upon us. It was a very managed type of service. The website was very simple. We just had a handful of products to offer. The amount of add-ons we had was very small. We basically gave you a machine with a licensed operating system, but we couldn’t give you the office applications. These are things that we were able to add.

One of our earliest customers was RPMC. They still are a customer today. They have 60 employees. We do their entire IT infrastructure. They use line of business applications and the typical back office applications. They do it through a terminal server environment that we built initially in 2007. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: CipherCloud CEO Pravin Kothari (Part 1)

Massive cloud adoption has added tremendous velocity to the speed at which business is done these days. However, it has also opened up security gaps. Listen to serial entrepreneur Pravin Kothari’s perspective on the subject.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Pravin Kothari: I’m the founder and CEO of CipherCloud. CipherCloud is a cloud security company. It’s focused on helping enterprise customers adopt cloud in a secure way. We allow our customers to get more visibility and more control over their cloud adoption.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take it from an ecosystem point of view. Could you map the ecosystem for us with a slightly high level perspective so that we can figure out where you’re positioning yourselves in that general landscape? >>>

Bootstrapping All The Way: Infinitely Virtual CEO Adam Stern (Part 3)

Adam Stern: Because we are engineers, we are largely responsible for helping Tutor Perini build their infrastructure team. We worked with them to build their skill levels and ensure that the instructor was choosing the right people for his team, and even to help them with inter-political battles. During that process, we earned a lot of professional services fees. Those fees were poured directly into our first virtualization.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you were basically customer-financed all through?

Adam Stern: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Great.

Adam Stern: We immediately made the transition from doing professional services. That was a big risk for us. >>>

Bootstrapping All The Way: Infinitely Virtual CEO Adam Stern (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the reception for the concept of hosting a virtualized infrastructure in your client base? What was the level of awareness? Were you doing missionary selling? How are you getting customers for that particular value proposition?

Adam Stern: We did talk to existing customers about what we were doing, and only a handful saw the value in it initially. We set down the road of building an e-commerce site with the idea that we were going to sell a very transparently-priced product to our customers. We built e-commerce where people could design their hosting environment online. It took a long time. We started writing articles for digital press to inform the public about what this was. It took a little while for people to really catch on. Very early on, we got some core customers who were great sources of word of mouth. Our growth in the early years was just astronomical. Part of it was to educate possible customers about what the value of this environment would be versus co-located hardware or managed hosting. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Utah: HireVue CEO Mark Newman (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You’re doing this all from Utah. Is that still the structure of the company?

Mark Newman: Yes, 60% of our team is in Utah. 30% is spread throughout the United States. These are people that work from home. Then, 10% of our team is global.

Sramana Mitra: What has your experience been like building this company from Utah? I’ve seen some very good companies come out of Utah. I’ve done a lot of Utah stories, oddly enough.

Mark Newman: I think we’re creating a really special place to build businesses. In 2010, we were the only company besides Fusion-io to raise venture capital. It was a dog market. There was no one coming in. It was really hard to build a business here in those days. Now, I laugh about kids today building businesses in Utah. There are two things that you do get in Utah. One is you get great team member loyalty. >>>

Carnival in the Cloud: Zenefits Threatens Insurance Brokers, HR SaaS Players

IBISWorld published an HR & Payroll Software market research report for the US markets earlier this year. The report estimated the industry to be worth $7 billion in revenues in the country, having grown 7% annually over the period 2010 through 2015. Cloud computing player Zenefits is a two-year-old startup that threatens the industry with a peculiar business model.

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Bootstrapping All The Way: Infinitely Virtual CEO Adam Stern (Part 1)

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

Adam has used some equipment financing, and plans to use more debt financing, to scale Infinitely Virtual. He has not used any venture capital or private equity, but has built a substantial company. Read on to learn how.

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

Adam Stern: I was born in Los Angeles to parents who came to this country in their early teens. Neither of them had attended university or college. My grandfather was denied entrance into university in Hungary on account of being Jewish. I was, early on, told that I was the hope of the family to go to university and do what my grandfather and father could never do. I grew up in a middle-class household. We didn’t want for anything but we didn’t have anything extravagant either. >>>