Vineet Jain, Egnyte
Enterprise Sales: How Egnyte Competed with Dropbox and Box
Vineet Jain is the co-founder and CEO of Egnyte, a content collaboration and security platform for mid-market and enterprise businesses. Vineet arrived in the US with $100 and no connections. He spent four and a half years at KPMG learning to sell to everyone from line managers to CEOs. That convinced him he could build something of his own. In 2001, right after the dot-com bubble burst, he co-founded Valdero, a supply chain software company, and raised $7.5 million from Kleiner Perkins. Revenue grew quickly. Then Oracle and SAP moved in. Pricing pressure crushed them. They sold. Investors made money. The 70 employees didn't. That failure stuck with him. In 2007, Vineet and three co-founders rented a small office. No funding. Two did consulting while the other two wrote code. The idea: move the physical file server to the cloud. When they launched, analysts lumped Egnyte in with Box and Dropbox - hundreds of companies chasing the same market. Everyone told Vineet to do freemium. His board pushed back. Analysts questioned how they were different. Vineet Jain built Egnyte to over $300 million in enterprise sales revenue using three strategies: charge from day one, offer hybrid cloud when everyone said go cloud-only, and keep cost of acquisition low with inside sales offices in cities like Spokane and Raleigh instead of Silicon Valley. In 2016, Gartner named Egnyte a leader - a tiny company standing alongside competitors that had raised billions. Today, Egnyte has 23,000 customers, 1,400 employees, and has raised just $137.5 million with no additional funding since 2018.
