Building a Mid-Market Cyber Security Company from Utah: Peter Bookman, CEO of Guard Dog (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s come back to your story. Did Fusion-io go public?

Peter Bookman: It did. It was relatively smooth. A year and a half later, I left to start a virtual desktop company. That transacted again to another storage company Sandisk. I love listening to and solving a real problem. Whether we look at virtual private networks that are very prolific and common today as well as storage, they’re not in all of the cloud.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after you left?

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The form factor of your product was that you would just clip it on a retail machine?

Paresh Patel: The design was remarkably simple. It almost works like a thumb drive. You just take the device and plug it into the machine. In three seconds, it could take that legacy machine and convert it into a modern mobile machine.

Sramana Mitra: A million and a half worth of orders were from how many customers?‘

Building a Mid-Market Cyber Security Company from Utah: Peter Bookman, CEO of Guard Dog (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In your case, the fact that you had a successful exit was helpful. Repeat founders always have an easier time raising money.

Peter Bookman: It does not hurt when your story can begin with, “I had a good horse and a good jockey. We won the race.” It does something else. You tend not to be alarmed, and you tend to be quite patient. It is fascinating that we got funding during that crisis.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I’ve experienced the use case that you described. The gas station around the corner from me doesn’t have any digital payment option.

Paresh Patel: That was the problem. The machine only took cash.

Sramana Mitra: Do the gas station people attend these kinds of trade shows?‘

Building a Mid-Market Cyber Security Company from Utah: Peter Bookman, CEO of Guard Dog (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Did you work for SonicWall?

Peter Bookman: I did not. I transitioned out. I’m always excited about the next opportunity.

Sramana Mitra: What year was that?

Peter Bookman: 2001.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is your Ph.D. in?

Paresh Patel: It’s also in e-business and organization management.

Sramana Mitra: The vending machine company was yourself?

Paresh Patel: There were employees. We grew to about 25 employees.

Building a Mid-Market Cyber Security Company from Utah: Peter Bookman, CEO of Guard Dog (Part 1)

Peter is a startup veteran who is building a new Cyber Security company from Utah. The key insight to focus on in this story is how he found white space in the mid-market.

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?

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 1)

Paresh did a superb job of validating in a bootstrapped mode and then raising significant venture capital. However, he made some mistakes after the fund raise. Eventually, he course-corrected and has built a wonderful business without further infusion of capital. Excellent case study!

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?‘