Bootstrapping to $100 Million: Edifecs CEO Sunny Singh (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you start with? Were you bootstrapping the company?

Sunny Singh: Yes, I took about 18 to 20 credit cards. That was seed money for Edifecs. I had no concept of VCs. I was not business savvy. That was how Edifecs got started. I’ve never run a business before.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you go on in this solo entrepreneur working out of the apartment?

Sunny Singh: In about two years, we moved into our first office, which was an old motel-turned office by a stingy, frugal landlord who had sheep in the back. Interestingly, the first night we moved in there, there was no security. I was so scared. I slept in the office at night. We hired a team of about six or seven people who were doing sales and some development. >>>

Building a Marketing Software Company from Utah: Convirza CEO Jason Wells (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: $3 million was raised from whom?

Jason Wells: They are a private investment group out of New York. They’re not a traditional venture capital firm. They’re more of a Warren Buffet type of an organization, which makes about one or two investments a year in public companies. They didn’t have a portfolio for us. This was really individual money plus a little fund that they put together. They would always tell us, “We don’t really make these kinds of investments, but we like what you’re doing. We like you guys. We’re not going to give you a lot of advice because we really don’t know your space but we think you have a great concept.”

When we did our funding press release, they asked us not mention them. They said, “We do not have a website. We do not want people soliciting investments from us. We make these choices.” We’ve kept that private at their request.

Sramana Mitra: What happens after the $3 million raise and you have a hypothesis that you were going to be execute on? It sounds like that became the business. Tell me more of the milestones of what happened after that. >>>

Building a Marketing Software Company from Utah: Convirza CEO Jason Wells (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What were the levers for scaling this? What strategy did you take to scale this business?

Jason Wells: Strategy number one was to change the business from a professional services business into a software business. There was some back-end technology and some software that was built to help them do these things, but the clients didn’t pay for any of that. They just paid a certain amount an hour for the services. The first piece was to create a software and a SaaS model. What’s interesting is you would take the client that would be paying more for the professional services and you would teach them to handle those human services on their own. They would have all the software to track their advertising and attribution and do the analytics on it. We built this prototype and essentially, used these existing customers as a test for this. >>>

Building a Marketing Software Company from Utah: Convirza CEO Jason Wells (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happens after Sony?

Jason Wells: That leads me to where we are today – Convirza and a few other company names in between that process. My brother-in-law Jeremiah Wilson started a company back in 2001 called Contact Point. He was the typical entrepreneur. He just went ahead and did it. He started a professional services company that recorded phone calls and provided sales training and coaching. We were talking one day in my office about business. An entrepreneur is always asking questions and just trying to learn and understand the business economics. He had this problem of being able to grow the business beyond a certain point. Having spent time in the telecom and the mobile marketing space, I was very intrigued. We talked through some ideas on how he might automate things like listening to calls or providing coaching.  >>>

Carnival in the Cloud: Workday Targets Financial Planning Segment

According to an IDC research report, public cloud spending is projected to grow 25% this year to be worth $21 billion and the private cloud IT spending is estimated to grow 16% this year to be worth more than $12 billion. Enterprise services provider Workday is benefiting from this projected growth and interest in the market.

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Building a Marketing Software Company from Utah: Convirza CEO Jason Wells (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You left in 2005?

Jason Wells: Yes, I left in 2005. I was tapped by a recruiter from Sony Pictures. Sony Pictures wanted to start and build a mobile content business around the world. They’ve got every movie asset. They have licensing rights for games and content. We had a 60-person development team to create creating mobile games. This is probably in the heyday of mobile content and the early days of apps on phones. >>>

Billion Dollar Unicorns: CloudFlare Offers Website Security over the Cloud

According to a recent RnRMarketResearch.com report, the Global Enterprise Cyber Security Market is projected to grow at 11.84% annually during the period 2014 to 2019. The growth in the market is said to be driven by the increasing demand for cloud security services. Billion Dollar Unicorn club member CloudFlare provides more than just cloud security and is growing at an exhilarating pace.

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Bootstrap the First Venture, Raise Money for the Second: cVidya CEO Alon Aginsky (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Other than the $400,000 that you got from the first investor, did you raise more money subsequently?

Alon Aginsky: No.

Sramana Mitra: You basically customer-financed the company, right?

Alon Aginsky: Yes, it was completely bootstrapped.

Sramana Mitra: So you finished college and then went to work for this company full-time.

Alon Aginsky: Yes. There was a good run in the US and also internationally. >>>