Successful Pivot to $5M in Revenue from Chicago: Cohesive Networks CEO Patrick Kerpan (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you quit Borland?

Patrick Kerpan: It was sometime in early 2006. I was going to do an excellent year off. After about two weeks of me reorganizing household processes, my wife said, “You’ve got to get an office outside of the house because you’re driving us all crazy.” The co-founder of the company and the Chairman called me and wanted me to do due diligence on some company in London. One of our other founders introduced me to Alexis Richardson. Our former head of security had gone in to help a friend cleaned up and get out of high-frequency trading.

As a group of people who’re experienced, it was like the old movies where they’re like, “Let’s put on a show. My mom will make costumes.” We wanted to build a company, but we had no idea what it would do. We spent the better part of 2006 focusing on what we would be doing. We came >>>

Successful Pivot to $5M in Revenue from Chicago: Cohesive Networks CEO Patrick Kerpan (Part 1)

Patrick has built an interesting company from Chicago that had to go through a significant pivot.

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?

Patrick Kerpan: I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. My father was a policeman. My mother raised us. He was a Chicago area farm boy. His family was Croatian immigrants. My mom was a Brooklyn girl. He met her during the war. I was born and bred Oklahoman. I get caught on words like defense and cement, but other than that, I sound more Midwestern.

I studied at Northwestern University in the Chicago area. I worked mostly full-time through university in order to be able to pay for it. I was working as a janitor at the Northwestern Student Center. I once missed a mandatory janitorial staff meeting. Apparently, it was very important because I was fired for missing that meeting. >>>

Building a Cyber Security Company from Israel: Aki Eldar, CEO of Secure Islands (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: In 2014, all the money that you raised was from Credit Suisse Next?

Aki Eldar: Only from Credit Suisse Next, which was also a vote of trust coming from a customer.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next milestone?

Aki Eldar: The next milestone is we’re expanding worldwide. We have an office in the US. Actually, we moved our headquarters to New York.

Sramana Mitra: Is your primary vertical financial services? >>>

Building a Cyber Security Company from Israel: Aki Eldar, CEO of Secure Islands (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you get that customer?

Aki Eldar: 2010.

Sramana Mitra: The financial crisis has settled a little bit. I was raising my eyebrows that you got a financial institution. A little bit of time had passed from the calamity.

Aki Eldar: They had a huge problem. We were the only one that could solve their problem.

Sramana Mitra: Who at Credit Suisse knew about you?

Aki Eldar: Nobody.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find this opportunity? >>>

Building a Cyber Security Company from Israel: Aki Eldar, CEO of Secure Islands (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to switch the line of questioning a little bit to the story of your entrepreneurial story. Let’s go back to eight years ago when you and your brother left your respective jobs to start this company. You both had deep experience in the security domain. You went and talked to Shlomo to get his validation and he resoundingly endorsed it. Did he offer you financing?

Aki Eldar: He invested.

Sramana Mitra: How did you start things off?

Aki Eldar: In Israel, there is a program which is led by the Office of the Chief Scientist. It’s part of the Economic Ministry of the Israeli government. This is a special program for startups where the government combines forces with the private industry and chooses different private entities to run incubators. 85% of the financing comes from the government and only 15% comes from the private sector. The private sector is the one that’s running the incubators. It’s a private incubator with government support. >>>

Building a Technology Product Company From India: Varun Singh, Founder and CTO of ScaleArc (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Very good. It’s wonderful to see that you pulled a hardcore technology product company out of India.

Varun Singh: You asked me earlier where the engineers were from. They’re from Veritas and IBM.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a good place to hire from. That’s a good thing about India right now. There are actually several generation of highly trained engineers who have worked at good companies building good products. There’s a lot of rich stuff if you can make them take risks.

Let me ask you a question, which is in the contemporary psyche. This whole notion of going to college. You didn’t go to college. You learned everything that you needed to learn in a very rich way. At the end of the day, you learned more by doing things hands-on than by studying theory. There’s no disagreement there. >>>

Building a Cyber Security Company from Israel: Aki Eldar, CEO of Secure Islands (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are the types of data and the sources of data that you’re securing? You talked about email earlier.

Aki Eldar: We’re talking about any unstructured data. Unstructured data could be emails, files, or documents. Regarding your question about the source, it could be any source. It could be any application. It could be any repository on or off-premise. It could be any source of data creation.

Sramana Mitra: What is the architecture of the product? Where does it fit and how does it get deployed?

Aki Eldar: Before I answer your question, I will elaborate a bit about our concept. We are calling it data immunization. We are immunizing that data and making the threat irrelevant. This data immunization contains five elements. The first element is the central policy. We will be able to define policies for the protection. The second one is the interception. It is our ability to intercept any data creation from any source, which is really very important. We are not talking only about office. We are talking about any application whether it’s Salesforce.com or SAP. >>>

Building a Technology Product Company From India: Varun Singh, Founder and CTO of ScaleArc (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You have good defensible IP.

Varun Singh: Very good defensible IP. That started a few conversation with other VCs. I started a conversation with BV Jagdish from NetScaler. I was one of BV’s largest customers in India. I knew him through Net Magic because he was on the Board. He introduced me to Justin who is our CEO right now. At that point in time, I had hired Justin as the COO. He did about six months of consulting with us before that. Before that, he was the VP Sales at Juniper.

Sramana Mitra: He hadn’t been a CEO before? >>>