Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So in 2004, you sold to NetApp. Did you work for NetApp?

Ron Bianchini: I did.

Sramana Mitra: For how long?

Ron Bianchini: As part of the acquisition, we all had two-year golden handcuffs, but I stayed for four years.

Sramana Mitra: To work for NetApp, did you have to move to Silicon Valley? What were the terms of that acquisition? >>>

Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I think there are clear winners. At the time that you were describing, Facebook wasn’t the clear winner by any stretch of the imagination. Once you have clear winners with massive market cloud, then those are the options that are being offered by other sites.

Eyal Magen: Right. What also happened is that obviously the user is now moving quickly between different screens – mobile, home computer, and work computer. Any service that wants to provide them with a unified experience across screens will have to ask the users to identify. These are the reasons why identity is becoming so central. We eventually became an enabler for sites to connect with a user using their identity to save the identity and user data, and most importantly, to connect to third-party systems that can leverage the user third-party data for marketing or personalization. >>>

Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That’s good. John Jarve is also an MIT grad by the way.

Ron Bianchini: I know. Have you met him?

Sramana Mitra: Yes, several times.

Ron Bianchini: He’s on my Board in my third company now.

Sramana Mitra: You raised a lot of money for Spinnaker. How long did it take you to bring the product to market and what kind of customers did you find traction in?

Ron Bianchini: We ran Spinnaker for four years from 2000 to 2004. In 2004, we sold it to Network Appliance for $300 million. >>>

From Y Combinator to Customer Traction and $50 Million in Financing: MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at Facebook?

Eric Frenkiel: Not very long, it was for 10 months in total. It was an amazing opportunity. We ultimately left Facebook because we had a bigger opportunity that we wanted to build. That was MemSQL. We joined in 2010 and left in early 2011. That was a big decision because an extra two months would have meant a quarter of the shares, but it happened to coincide with YCombinator, which have fixed start dates. If you don’t start on the fixed date, you’d miss the class. In many ways, it was an easier decision because you just walk away. You look forward to the next venture.

Sramana Mitra: You took your idea and applied to YCombinator?

Eric Frenkiel: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You had co-founders? >>>

From Y Combinator to Customer Traction and $50 Million in Financing: MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel (Part 1)

Eric and his co-founder Nikita left Facebook to join YCombinator to develop their idea for MemSQL. The company has blossomed into a robust enterprise software business with a solid customer base.

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

Eric Frenkiel: I was born and raised in Southern California. I studied at Stanford when I actually decided to specialize in engineering. I looked at a lot of schools and I thought that Stanford was the best place for me to grow and learn. I graduated in 2008.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of engineering did you study at Stanford?

Eric Frenkiel: Operation Research. You would call it industrial engineering in another time. In Stanford, it’s called Management Science and Engineering. >>>

Competing with Box and Dropbox: Soonr Co-Founder and CTO Steven Boye (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: When you win big deals with enterprise customers, what is it that allows you to win these deals?

Steven Boye: It is typically the quality of our products. Everybody that we compete with, they are currently Dropbox or Box users. Most of them are. For some reason, they like our solution better.

Sramana Mitra: Do you know why?

Steven Boye: Soonr wins business because we have the most powerful mobile file sync-and-share experience available: smart selective sync that allow users to take entire folders or subfolders on-the-go; full online or full offline mode; integrated document editing and annotation with built-in MDM/DLP security features such as remote wipe; and no additional software needed. >>>

Competing with Box and Dropbox: Soonr Co-Founder and CTO Steven Boye (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How many telcos do you have as customers today?

Steven Boye: I think we have three today. AT&T is the biggest. What we’ve learned is that telcos are hard to work with. They are good once they engage, but it’s really a long sales cycle. In the years since, several things have happened.

In 2010 to 2012, we basically found out what it is that Soonr is. Soonr became less of a telco solution and more of a cloud collaboration solution. Then we also launched Soonr for enterprise. In 2011 and 2012, the focus of the company became clear. It has been such a shifting landscape and you basically had to try and pivot all the time to found out what makes sense at any time. We have gone through quite a few pivots as you can probably tell over the years. >>>

Competing with Box and Dropbox: Soonr Co-Founder and CTO Steven Boye (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to what?

Steven Boye: Now we come up to 2006. We actually got funding from a company called Clearstone Venture Partners in LA. During 2006 to 2008, we also got Intel Capital and Cisco as strategic investors. Now, we started getting real money to build the company.

Sramana Mitra: What was the basis of that investment?

Steven Boye: At that time, the product had synthesized more into a cloud-based service for online backup and collaboration. It then became much easier to raise capital. >>>