Wednesday, June 30, 2021

In a cash rich VC world @ThinkstCanary Haroon Meer - founder and CEO bootstrapped and has crossed $11M in ARR -




What it does 

Cybersecurity

Canary provides  an early warning system using honeypots - for $10k and 4 minutes of your time - you will know that you are being hacked and where - and you identify the hacker 


The Product

Thinkst deploy security honeypots that allow customers to discover when they are breached (without them having to be informed by third parties some 300 days later). 


The key - deployment and management needed to be dead-simple. 


Honeypots have a long history in the security world (pre-dating Canary by decades), but were always painful to install and run. Removing this pain became their North Star. 


What made the succeed 

Kept promises

We were so crazily grateful for the early customers who took a chance on us, that all 5 of us worked like crazy to make sure we never dropped a promise. We are genuinely grateful for our customers and work hard to keep our promises is baked into everything we do and guides all our product decisions.


Being grateful to our customers guides all our decisions, so our sales will never be spammy, and our legal documents try hard to be in simple English and gotcha-free. 


Connecting and collaborating


In 2017 we attended a bunch of evening functions and most were not really our scene. So in 2018, we rented a venueabout a kilometre from the madness for a little gathering of our own. While all the parties and bars were full and loud music was making sure nobody could hear anybody else, we had a quiet location where we bought drinks and pizza as Halvar Flake spoke about his experiences selling his first company to Google.


In 2019 we had the same deal with Jon Oberheide talking about how they scaled and sold Duo Security to Cisco.


A nice place to work


The rush to market in our early days demanded long hours, but we’ve been able to grow our team over this time so we didn’t all have to be “on” constantly. Today, while still small by sprawling SV standards (we are 22 people all in) we get to work pretty normal hours. (It’s still totally normal to see people chatting on Slack in the wee hours of the morning, but this could just as easily be people commenting on recent NFT craziness as it is likely to be because of work.)


We get to focus on projects that reasonably stretch each other, we get to work on features we think are important, and we get a chance to ship stuff that doesn’t suck. (It’s a little bit surprising, but just committing to not sucking is surprisingly rare). Over time it means we get to build a team of smart people who enjoy what they do and enjoy how we do it.


Giving Back


One of our core values at Thinkst is that we can do well by doing good. We sit in South Africa which ranks first in the world  for income inequality. Last year we were able to cover tuition & accommodation for 3 University students, and over the past 2 years have managed to donate over a million dollars to local charities. We have some cool plans to do a little more in this space, but we will save those announcements for after we have more of those runs on the board.


The Product, the product, the product


If there’s one take-away from this post for young startups, let it be this: 

The product absolutely matters. 


If you can combine a great product with a really low burn-rate you are in fantastic shape for the road ahead (that’s particularly true for entrepreneurs outside the Valley).


The secret sauce - passion about the product and the people 


From day-1 we’ve focused relentlessly on making Canary better, easier to deploy and easier to manage. We constantly research and develop new Canarytokens that can be used to detect badness with high levels of certainty (for small deployment costs). As we’ve grown, we’ve been able to hire smarter people so we’ve been able to continually up our game, from the devices we ship to the infrastructure that makes it all possible.



What do you miss out when bootstrapping vs VC 


  • Great VCs make good sounding boards for problems you might be having (but great VCs are pretty rare). So founders need to find the right VC
  • Press is easier to come by for funded startups, but we also don’t think that that sort of press is super helpful.
  • VCs give you credibility and in some ways give you permission to act grown up. 
  • It almost certainly has benefits for exits.


Where to from here 


For us, it’s absolutely business as usual. We know that we’re still judged by our next update.  That all our previous customer interactions don't matter if we screw up the next one. 



So we continue to work like hell keeping our promises, growing Canary by making even more customers happy.


An inspirational interview with  Haroon Meer - a hacker made good!




Inspired from 

https://blog.thinkst.com/2021/03/we-bootstrapped-to-11-million-in-arr.html?m=1

Wednesday, June 23, 2021

Incredible year for @ZellerAustralia


Founders :- Ben Pfisterer and Dominic Yap

The Money

Spark Capital invests $50m at a $400m valuation into Zeller - making  founders Ben Pfisterer and Dominic Yap,l (former Square Execs  and founding investors pretty happy !


This is what founding investor  Square Peg’s Paul Bassat had to say:- 


Raised $81m in 3  rounds, hired 75 people & acquired 1500 customers in 4 weeks post launch. Awesome work @benpfisterer Dom & your amazing team. Memo to small biz: switching to Zeller is a no brainer

 @SquarePegCap


So who is Spark Capital  - a fund who invested in Twitter, Slack and Coinbase - the dude who managed this investment is James Kuklinski


What does Zeller do

The company launched its first products for small businesses on May 4, including EFTPOS (electronic funds transfer at point of sale) terminals, business accounts and cards.


The customer take up

The company says more than 1,500 Australian businesses signed up in the month after its launch, and weekly payment volume has been growing 200%. About 80% of businesses that started using Zeller switched from Australia’s four biggest banks, citing their desire for lower fees and better customer support.


What’s the money going to be used for 

To grow its research and engineering hub, including filling 18 new engineering roles that will support Zeller’s plan to become a fully regulated business bank.


Why it will succeed 

Australian banking system  is ripe for disruption and  Zeller is in a position to disrupt!


“Its technology is simpler, has more transparent pricing, is best-in-class technology and had better customer service.”

So what’s at Stake?


Today Stake announced it’s plans to partner with one of the large Australian broker-dealers that will let its users buy and sell all publicly traded stocks and ETFs on the ASX and Chi-X.


So what’s at Stake?


Stake is a low-cost equities broker with over 300k users, and will allow customers to  trade ASX-listed equities and exchange traded funds (ETFs) putting pressure on incumbent brokers like CommSec by lowering fees to next to 0 and providing a slicker trading experience.


Stake is an Australian alternative to Robinhood – that provides millions of customers  with cheap access to US equities. 


#neweraofbrokerage #asx #disruptfinancialmarkets #nexttechrevolution #disruption #anewway

Friday, June 04, 2021

Superhero


Aussie Online Training Startup sells to USA Pluralsight for $2 billion




Melbourne brothers Sam and Ryan Kroonenburg have struck it rich after their online learning startup was snapped up by US giant Pluralsight in a deal that values the company at more than $2 billion.

The Kroonenburg brothers started A Cloud Guru just over five years ago after Sam built the online training provider in four weeks from his bedroom. It has grown to $116 million in revenue driven by the shift to online education and cloud storage.

A Cloud Guru teaches people how to use cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform and has more than 2.5 million users around the world. The startup is backed by local venture capital firm Airtree Ventures alongside US-based Summit Partners and Elephant, and has raised a total of $55 million in funding.

https://apple.news/AzHVK-d2dSh2wSfc2hjohBw