Will CA or BMC Acquire Apigee?

According to a recent Forrester report, application programming interface (API) management is a fast growing, albeit, relatively recent IT concern. The issue has gained significant importance due to the growing adoption of mobile applications as the means for consumers to shop and access a company’s goods and services. The market is led by CA Technologies, which entered the sector in 2013 with the acquisition of Layer 7 Technologies. But Apigee is also making its mark felt.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Jack Norris, CMO of MapR (Part 1)

MapR has innovated on the Hadoop Open Source building blocks to build a suite of products currently used by hundreds of customers across verticals. This interview double clicks down on some of the use cases, as well as entrepreneurial opportunities in the Big Data field.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to MapR. Tell us who you are, what you do, and a bit of your own personal background.

Jack Norris: I’m the CMO at MapR Technologies. MapR is a Big Data leader with its hot-ranked distribution of Hadoop. As part of our offerings, we have the top-ranked Hadoop, top-ranked NoSQL database, and top-ranked SQL on Hadoop solution. We’re helping organizations transform their business and be more effective by being able to better leverage data. We’re seeing companies do that in a way that actually impacts their business as it happens. >>>

Successful Pivot to $5M in Revenue from Chicago: Cohesive Networks CEO Patrick Kerpan (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: We are huge believers in content marketing. That’s the only kind of marketing that we do.

Patrick Kerpan: We clearly lost some opportunities but for a small company, we would never hear from customers until they were POC complete. They’d go to Amazon. They’d use the free edition. They had tried it and they probably have something up and running. Now, they needed to grow it. We put in place a mechanism where we didn’t want to hear from a customer unless they were close to completing proof of concept. Rather than having big, wide funnels, we would have 15 leads at 60% probability.

Sramana Mitra: In general, any kind of inbound leads are very good news. If it’s an inbound query or request, you’ve won half the battle.

Patrick Kerpan: Right, but you don’t have that kind of pipeline where you put everybody you’ve ever met in the pipeline and they’re all a million dollar deal with 10% probability. You just get killed with all that talking. The other thing that’s different is I think we got the pricing right. There’s some competition now. >>>

Serial Bootstrapper: Oversee and Manage Founder Fred Hsu (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What do you want to do? You’ve had one successful exit. You’re in a financially comfortable position. You’ve built a second company that is also bootstrapped and very profitable. You’re still fairly young. What do you want to do with your business? How are you thinking about your choices and options now?

Fred Hsu: For me, it’s all about people. From a business perspective, I want to make sure my founders and the employees who stuck around see similar success to what I’ve seen in the past and also take enough knowledge from what they’ve learned here to their next startup. On a personal side, I have two children. They’re three and five. I want them to see daddy work. I don’t play golf. I’m not going to be home in my bunny slippers. I don’t even have slippers. Probably work, life normalcy, and high aspirations for my co-founders, employees, and my kids.

Sramana Mitra: Do you want to continue running this company and growing this to a much larger scale? Or do you want to exit this company and start another one? >>>

Successful Pivot to $5M in Revenue from Chicago: Cohesive Networks CEO Patrick Kerpan (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You said you pivoted and there was one product that you had to sell and the other product people wanted to buy. Talk a little bit more about how you proceeded from when you hit that realization? How did you move? How did you take advantage of the market pull that you discovered?

Patrick Kerpan: Good question. It created the opportunity where we got some other incremental funding. We needed some funding to make that transition. We were doing these flexible images where you can mix and match software components to make the virtual computer your choice.

The one missing piece of the software was message queuing. We had servers and databases. In the world of message queuing, you just had this Java component called ActiveMQ. Other than that, you had to use IBM MQ Series or something super expensive. We looked at that and said, “Somebody has to do something. If we’re going to build these Internet-based systems, what we’re going to need is a better queuing system.” >>>

Serial Bootstrapper: Oversee and Manage Founder Fred Hsu (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What are the milestones of this business? By how much did it scale? How fast did it scale? What kind of strategy did you follow to make it grow?

Fred Hsu: What we wanted to do at first was to basically get a good sense of the market and establish a few key customers. We all had this internal confidence that if we got the customers, we know how to go out there and get the demand. We can build the full stack and do it better than anybody else out there. It started with a simple kernel. There wasn’t an intense capital need. Computing power was already ten times more powerful at a fraction of the cost than it was back in 2000 when I started doing startups. We didn’t need a lot of outside capital.

We also didn’t necessarily need a large sales force or support infrastructure just yet. We didn’t want to get too many customers to start off with. We really wanted to focus on making sure our systems work for a small set of deep pocket clients. The business lost $50,000 in 2011. But in 2012, it generated about $2 million in gross revenue. In 2013, $18 million. In 2014, we ended up with just under $80 million. >>>

Successful Pivot to $5M in Revenue from Chicago: Cohesive Networks CEO Patrick Kerpan (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let me understand a couple of things. You talked a bit about Boards and about lightly capitalized company. Can you explain to me what the capitalization of the company is?

 Patrick Kerpan: The corporation is Cohesive Flexible Technologies Corporation. It’s a C-Corp. It owns two limited liability companies. One has all the image automation that’s just parked and the other owns the network virtualization.

Sramana Mitra: Who owns the corporation?

Patrick Kerpan: It’s a series of investors – family, friends, angels, O’Connor family.

Sramana Mitra: It’s not institutional ownership? >>>

Serial Bootstrapper: Oversee and Manage Founder Fred Hsu (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In 2009, you were out. What did you do next?

Fred Hsu: I moved out of LA. I married and had two kids. I raised them for a couple of years and got the entrepreneur itch again. Then in about 2010, I met up with an old college friend called Kai. He was in the Computer Science program in UCLA with me. He and I had actually met the day our parents dropped us off at the dorm. We were about 17 back then in 1996 and had been very close throughout the years. We decided we wanted to do some more projects together.

In 2010, we created a company called AppBank. The concept there was to capitalize on the social wave. We allowed end users to create their own apps on Facebook. It went from zero to single-digit millions in revenue pretty quickly. It was very profitable.

Sramana Mitra: Was it a platform company?
>>>