The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 17

Diego Oppenheimer, Algorithmia

Launching a Marketplace for Algorithms With 14K Devs

Diego Oppenheimer is the co-founder and CEO of Algorithmia, a Seattle-based marketplace that connects academics building algorithms with app developers who need them. The company was founded in 2013 and raised $2.5 million in funding. The idea of launching a marketplace for algorithms started during a backpacking trip through Australia and New Zealand in 2008. Diego and his co-founder Kenny Daniel had been friends since college, and they spent months in a tent with a notebook and laptop, mapping out what a computation marketplace could look like. It took another five years of refining the concept before they launched. The real validation came from Diego's time at Microsoft. While building features for Excel, his team needed an advanced algorithm. After months of searching Microsoft Research - a $7 billion operation - he found that the exact algorithm he needed had already been built and was sitting inside Excel. Nobody knew. That failure to connect research with product teams, even inside one of the best companies in the world, confirmed that launching a marketplace to bridge that gap was a real opportunity. When it came time to raise money, Diego used his Excel skills to build a spreadsheet rating 60 investors by fit, location, interest, and portfolio overlap. Then he flipped the list and started pitching from the bottom - worst fit first. The logic: his pitch would be terrible early on, so he would learn from the investors least likely to fund him. By the time he reached the top of the list, he had answers to every hard question. The strategy worked, and they closed $2.5 million. Today Algorithmia has a team of nine, over 14,000 developers on the platform, and partnerships with universities. Diego talks about doing things that don't scale in the early days, the shift from internal product building to external evangelism, and the biggest lesson he learned transitioning from a company like Microsoft to startup speed.

Mike Muhney, VIPOrbit

Finding Product-Market Fit With $15K Left and a Napkin

Mike Muhney is the co-founder and CEO of VIPOrbit Software, a company focused on building great contact management products. Their flagship product, Vipor CRM, is available on iOS and Mac platforms. The company was founded in 2010 and has raised over $4 million in funding. In 1986, Mike co-founded a software business that eventually failed. With only $15,000 remaining from an angel investment of $100,000, he and his co-founder had a choice: close down or come up with another idea. A mentor suggested a brainstorm breakfast, and over four hours they sketched the menu structure for what would become ACT! Contact Management Software on a napkin. That moment of finding product-market fit changed everything. They built a product they needed themselves - a digital version of the paper Daytimer organizer with seamless integration between contacts, activities, and notes. ACT! went on to create an entirely new software category. Mike became a celebrity in the tech industry, speaking at major conferences worldwide. Seven years after that brainstorm breakfast, they sold ACT! for $47 million. Mike walked away with just under $5 million from his 10% stake. But the story after the exit is equally revealing. Mike struggled with a sense of emptiness and fading relevance. He launched Celebrity Soft, signing Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley for a fantasy golf game - only to have Jordan pull out without explanation, collapsing the entire venture. He spent years at Deloitte Consulting and SalesLogix before the itch to build his own thing returned. In 2009, sitting in his home office reading a BusinessWeek article about the app economy, Mike had his second finding product-market fit moment. He realized the CRM industry had reached fewer than 14 million users worldwide despite billions of smartphone owners. He started VIPOrbit Software to build the contact management tool he still needed himself - the same motivation that produced ACT! decades earlier. Mike is also candid about the fear that accompanies entrepreneurship at every stage. He describes the "front office" enthusiasm that entrepreneurs project versus the "back office" fear of running out of money, not being discovered, and watching time run out.