Founding Elance, then Webaroo: Beerud Sheth’s Entrepreneurial Journey (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Up till what point were you operationally involved?

Beerud Sheth: I was there until 2005, or about seven years in the company. In 2001, we started this enterprise software and we sold it in 2007. While the company was heavily focused on the enterprise side, I was a little less interested in that part. I was itching to start something else. That was when I moved on with Webaroo.

Sramana Mitra: What was the concept behind Webaroo?

Beerud Sheth: Webaroo has been a mobile messaging company from the beginning. Around that time, which was pre-iPhone days, we ended up building up a text messaging platform. For a variety of reasons, we ended up focusing on Asia, India in particular. >>>

Founding Elance, then Webaroo: Beerud Sheth’s Entrepreneurial Journey (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The movement right now is very much in favor of Elance. oDesk is more our platform but it’s the same concept. The only way I can run the company is because of what you’ve invented. However, I have always been a bit early in things. I did a fashion company in 1999. That was completely way ahead of this time. We did not survive the dot-com crash. Timing is a concern for a lot of people who are trying to get it right. >>>

Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 2)

Manmeet Singh: I started thinking of better ways to secure data. That’s when I started thinking about data masking. Data masking can keep the data relevant and useful for non-production, and in certain cases, production environment also and take the personal PII and PCI values out of it. I found a couple of people who shared the same ideas and we started this company.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of getting the company going, you said you raised $900,000 in the beginning. Before you raised the money, what did you do to validate? Did you have a set of early customers, or at least, a customer discussion? What was the validation process like?

Manmeet Singh: That’s a good question. My validation was my consulting group. >>>

Billion Dollar Unicorns: MuleSoft Will Be Joining Soon

A Goldman Sachs study published last month estimates the global SaaS market to grow to $106 billion by next year, translating to a 15% growth over the year. Here is an interesting story of MuleSoft, an integration platform provider for multiple SaaS-based enterprise applications that is expected to join the Billion Dollar Unicorn club soon.

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Founding Elance, then Webaroo: Beerud Sheth’s Entrepreneurial Journey (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What in your background made you think about Elance?

Beerud Sheth: I think it’s actually connecting a lot of dots for me.

Sramana Mitra: It’s always easy to connect dots when you’re looking back.

Beerud Sheth: We actually approached it that way. As an Indian, you know that there are millions of talented people in India and around the world. This was enabling people to meet each other and find freelancers anywhere in the world. As a Wall Street trader, I knew that you create marketplaces when you take illiquid things and make them more liquid. Services are generally highly illiquid. Enabling the technology part was due to the Computer Science background. Lastly, it was just a point in time where a lot of focus was in the commerce of goods, but the commerce of services is actually a bigger part of the GDP of the economy. >>>

Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 1)

I have never seen a company raise so much money from so many angels. It is far from standard practice in the industry, but Manmeet did it! Find out how…

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from and where were you raised? Give me the back story of your entrepreneurial journey.

Manmeet Singh: I’m from New Delhi, India. I did my education back in India. In about a year, I came to the US as a programmer for HCL. Since then, I’ve been in the IT field, working for large companies. In 1999, I made a move towards startups. I learned how >>>

Founding Elance, then Webaroo: Beerud Sheth’s Entrepreneurial Journey (Part 1)

Beerud Sheth founded Elance back in 1998. At the time, the concept was new and path breaking. Today, with freelancing becoming a gigantic part of the global workplace, the company is playing a massive role in matching businesses with service providers. You can also read our interview with Fabio Rosati on Elance’s evolution.

Today, Beerud is on his second company, Webaroo, which in turn, is on its second mobile messaging product.

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?
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Billion Dollar Unicorns: Cloud Investment Thesis of 5 VCs

Last fall, we had five VCs participate in our 1M/1M roundtables to discuss their Cloud Computing investment thesis. These interviews cover as well as build upon the themes discussed in my two recent books, Billion Dollar Unicorns and Carnival In The Cloud. If you are looking to build a Unicorn company in the Cloud Computing domain, I strongly recommend you listen to these five interviews. In each case, listening to just the first 30 minutes would be adequate.

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