YouSaid · the spoken record

Javier Soltero

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39
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2015-09-06
most recent
2015-09-06
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “Oh, great question. So we are now Outlook Mobile. I am now in charge of all sort of the strategic direction of all Outlook products, not just the mobile one. So over the next five years, we're here to make email awesome and really take this incredibly powerful and pervasive medium that we often sort of complain about and hate and really turn it into something that people genuinely love and feel like it has adapted into the modern age and so forth.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “My career highlight my career highlight was having after the sale of hyperic having a very young and early employee that we hired send me a note telling me he was leaving VMware but thanking me for having given him the opportunity to work with us because it enabled him to buy a house with his new wife. That was a very touching reminder of the impact that you can have in people's lives and doing something like this and having survived through a very difficult economically uncertain time. That was just an incredible thing to read.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Successful founder I think Mark Zuckerberg probably is the only guy that I can really quickly pinpoint that has seemed to nail every single thing along the way and kudos to him.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Favorite newsletter or blog. What is my favorite? I read so many different aggregators that, you know, wait, but why? There you go. Now I can give you a complete answer. Which I just recently found out about and is absolutely brilliant writing.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Favorite book hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquis because it's just an amazingly contrived, often humorous, mostly sad story told in the most ridiculous way possible.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Scaled awareness and then the sort of go-to-market piece, which I would have been excited. I know we would have gotten that right too. But Microsoft really made us a proposition that made a lot of sense and that we were very excited about.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, and also, frankly, the reach, building. So here's another thing we've learned very quickly is you could be extraordinarily popular, you could have great ratings, you can have an amazing engineering process and all this stuff. And yet really in the app world, you have to carry your own water in order for the world to know who you are, the app store world makes that in many ways very difficult because it's a single, it's really two marketplaces that are the sole vehicles for delivery of your product out to its intended audience. And those vehicles are just deeply flawed, frankly, and they're flawed for many of the right reasons or whatever, but it just means that in order for people to find out who accomplish is, they have to really find out elsewhere because nobody just cruises the app store looking for stuff. So it was both a combination of...”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Company and a great product, and there's really no better thing to experience as an entrepreneur than really feeling like you, in the midst of so much uncertainty got so much to go your way, frankly, because I really think that I was just very lucky. So somewhere in that long-winded thing is the answer that I hope.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “That side of the business required a significant amount of investment and some more brain power to really crack open. And at the same time, you get presented with this unsolicited opportunity to join up with somebody who already has that credibility and has that reach and then also has the ability to take what turned out to be the right product and deliver it at a scale that's unprecedented. And so you size that up and you say, yeah, I mean, clearly the opportunity to do this on behalf of Microsoft, especially in a situation where what was important for me at the time was that everybody won, right? Like that Microsoft won because they bought the right company, that our investors and employees won because the economics were very, very good for them. I won because I guess we built a great team and a great”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And I was pretty excited about that. That's the part of the business that I was much more familiar with. It really was, it's kind of an exciting transition into really growing up as a team and as a company. And as we were going through these early customer conversations, it was very interesting to see how eager people were to have this problem be solved and then sort of be reminded of the importance of vendor credibility and the difficulty that you had to walk through to establish yourself as somebody who can really be trusted with this kind of data, trusted with this kind of responsibility. And we were prepared for that, right? Like we were not shaken by that in any way. But somehow the more we saw that, the more it was reminded. Of how much more sort of”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “By the time we started having more serious conversations with Microsoft, we were in the middle of a transition from a deeply loved and widely adopted end user email application into a what is the enterprise sort of business that you're going to build around this product. In other words, how are you going to make money? Like what is really the business other than this great app, what else is there? At the time, we were very, very, very fortunate to already have like multiple millions of dollars of sales pipeline and customers actually two in Europe, one in the UK, and two in the US who were working with us very closely to really sign up and craft what would become the”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “What was your valuation and all this stuff? I'm like, what are you guys fucking talking about? Like, this is not even a real market. Venture capital is not a true market in the sense that it's a very limited number of players often colluding and really incestuously sort of managing deal flow back and forth. And it works. It's an amazing part of the United States economy and certainly of the global economy, but it's hardly something to brag about, right? And hey, congratulations. You raised money at a great valuation. I'm like, okay, uh-huh.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “No, I don't think so. I think from a fundraising perspective, I understand, you know, unlike, I would never claim to be good at raising money. That seems to be a really sort of shallow skill to cite. It's important, but it's not what makes a great entrepreneur, frankly. Like oftentimes the best conversations with potential investors are really more about the challenges and the big questions that are left to be answered in the path to growing a great company and less about the terms of the pre and the post and the party pursue and whatever other sort of fun term sheet like BS that you want to cite right like I remember very distinctly when we when we built hyperic I just every time people just seem you go to these gatherings you talk to other entrepreneurs and everybody was like anyway”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Many, many reasons. It was a very short conversation. Satisha and I agreed that ostensibly a $5 million investment was probably what it would take to go build out the product and take it to market and then see what happens. And we were fortunate that in doing that along the way the company was generating so much buzz and momentum even before launching the product that we were proactively sort of approached by some excellent investors who added on to our To our pool of cash, and we did great. It's great.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Not really. We were very, I would say, grounded in our process for the fundraising process was in many ways very simple. Satish and I, after I sort of really came up with the problem statement and really described the opportunity that I thought existed around mobile email to Satish, he agreed without a doubt. He said absolutely, this must be done. And I said, okay, well, I think it's going to take a significant investment. It's not going to take seed capital to validate it along the way to blah, blah, blah. And by the way, I'm not into that, right? If I'm going to go build a company, I'm picking something very hard on purpose because I've already had a different kind of opportunity with Hyperic, which was also hard, by the way. I don't mean to suggest that one was actually, if anything, hyperic was infinitely harder for.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “They were also, they had the same investors at Hyperic did. They were also doing an open source thing that looked very similar to ours. Also a very successful outcome for Zimbra. I had gotten to know Satisha over the years, and then he was the one who kind of convinced me to leave VMware and come over and spend time with the folks at Redpoint. And it was a great, great experience. And so really it was Satish who initially had the real sort of burning desire to go do something in mobile email. I was, if anything, if you had asked me in February of 2013 when I was there midway through my time at Redpoint, if you thought I'd be doing an email company and much less be working at Microsoft as a result, I would have said you're absolutely fucking crazy. But the reality is here I am.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “So I had met Satish Dharmaraj who was our lead investor many years ago when I was CEO of Hyperic, he was CEO of a company called Zimbra, which he founded as well. And Zimbra was in the email space. They were an open source email server product.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “It's not a perfect thing, but it works pretty well, actually. I found that you should try that with the next set of products that you look at or the next entrepreneurs that you talk to and say, hey, is this a vitamin? We should all be building by agri products for sure”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Problem, right? And then, of course, Viagra products are the simplest products. They help you do things you previously thought were not possible. And it's a really”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “So vitamin products are products for whom the major benefits of using it are not felt immediately. They're sort of felt down the line in somewhat of an indirect way. And they're generally things that are, you can think of them as good hygiene products, right? Like it would be nice. It would be probably better if I used this, but do I absolutely need it? Maybe not, right? Painkiller products fall under a class of product that, as the name implies they take away pain and the challenge with those products is, yes, they're attractive and everybody needs them. However, you're always subject to the, let's say, the person, metaphorically speaking, and their tolerance for pain, how willing they are to put up with the pain, or how long lived the pain is because maybe the pain goes away and they stop needing to use your product. And then you have sort of a churn.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “That helped me determine at the time it was more about like, hey, is this an idea worth pursuing or is this a product that really needs to exist? Maybe that comment from Sequoia had really left a mark, this idea that they thought that hyperic was a product in search for a market, which of course hundreds of millions of dollars of years later, or hundreds of millions of dollars later, I'm happy to say they were wrong.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “This very basic test, and I'll share this. This is not my idea. I heard this from somebody else and I think somebody wrote this up in a blog post somewhere. But there's three kinds of products. There's vitamin products, painkiller products, and Viagra. And that simple heuristic, which I can expound on if you like.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Just didn't know how. And so that meant that there were no really good tools for it and that that left the engineers, namely people like me in a position to have to carry a pager around. So I had a first-hand view of what the absence of proper sort of web-oriented or web infrastructure-oriented monitoring products wound up looking like. And then for many years later, I think my approach to product market fit there was more based around this, I wanted to find an otherwise simple, straightforward way of identifying or describing the problem that we were going to solve. An EIR at Redpoint, I looked at a variety, like maybe four different types of things. And those four different types of things all failed.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “For hyperic, I guess it's safe to say that I had a firsthand experience with the absence of products in this category. The company that I was at prior to covalent was a dot-com era sort of consumer company. And I was an engineer there, but it turns out that the sort of operations role for that company, for which there were people who at the time were referred to as network operations, who were responsible for keeping this large consumer service up and running, they just didn't know how to do it. And the reason was because all they really knew how to do was data center type work. So cabling, racking, stacking, router configuring, all that kind of fun stuff, maybe some OS level management, but when it really came down to managing this new type of web infrastructure,”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “It depends so in the case of hyperic, which was the product that we took out of covalent and the company that I started, versus say something like a comple, the answer to that question was a little different. One was an infrastructure product, an infrastructure management product aimed at IT, the other an end user application aimed at, well, obviously end users, sorry, a mail application aimed at end users.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “To a very, very nasty once in a generation kind of economic cataclysm where everything looked like it was upside down. And I wonder how well, in fact, I don't wonder, I'm certain that most people that are building companies nowadays would have a very hard time in such a sudden and drastic adjustment to the way people look at cash and capital and barn rates and whatnot.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Compared to what people are getting today. And you say, you know, sit there and think about it. That is more money than 99% of people will see in their entire lifetime. And it's being given to you in favor of building this business and chasing this idea. And you really just kind of have to really respect that, right? And I was never one for sort of VC The venture business is very interesting and all that and I've worked at some amazing people in it. But the idea that there's this sort of almost sporting like quality to the things that surround entrepreneurship and particularly around technology companies is I just really kind of sends me into a bad dark place I guess. And so all of this is I think to come back to the idea of saying we were never super comfortable with having tons of money. I'm glad we weren't because we sailed in.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “And in a sense, I became very, I don't know that it was cynical, I was always very cautious, I guess, of the responsibility that comes with making additional commitments that take money, that where you're investing in either people or infrastructure, even getting a lease for a larger office, all these things never felt quite comfortable to me. And I was glad I was able to preserve that basically all the way through that journey and have it still had accomplished because the reality of this is, Harry, that people talk about venture investment in very sort of loose terms in this town, and I think around the world, given the sort of mass popularity of startups and entrepreneurship and whatnot, if you really sort of sit down and kind of internalize the idea that somebody's giving you, in our case back then, it was something like $4 million a pittance.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Two of my business partners had kids. And you become very, very good at sort of managing around scarcity. And it's very clarifying, frankly. So in the transition from that into being a well-capitalized top tier venture-backed company, the seed of the soul of the company was planted around this idea of winning customers was the only thing that mattered because it's what kept us alive.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Part of the virtue of growing a business with zero capital, there was no friends in family money, there was no, all we had was this product that had cost about fifteen million dollars to build and we had been lucky enough to buy it for a dollar and embarked on this journey, that first bootstrapping journey, knowing that the company was coming or the product was coming from an overcapitalized scenario and that the chances of us really being able to make an argument of any kind about further investment in something that was by many people, including Sequoia, considered a sort of a product in search for a market and something that was very misguided was it just meant we thought about it very differently and there was a genuine sense of urgency and consequence. We were all in our early 30s at the time. Some of us had kids I didn't.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “The whole time it was very challenging, and the whole time I learned a lot. We thrived through the 2008 financial crisis. I was a really challenging time for me and something that I think Internalized enough, frankly, by most entrepreneurs today. And yeah, all of that was, the investors had a huge part in doing that.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Who was initially at Excel and now at Benchmark, Peter just was very good at sort of reminding me that the real goal, the real sort of winning opportunity for a technology company and a startup is to build a great large enduring company and product and that that's measured in a different scale, I think, than what typically sort of a more grounded and just equally valuable sort of lifestyle business owner to use a very sort of controversial phrase would think of, right? So I thought I was doing a great job when I showed up there and I realized that what we were trying to do and what our investors were expecting of us for all the right reasons was a lot more than what I thought I could easily deliver and so that worked out well because”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Another great question. I'm excited to be here. So the 20-minute VC podcast version of that question is basically a good investor is one that really pushes you and inspires you to achieve more than what you think you can deliver. And in my case, when we first started working with venture investors, we had already bootstrapped the company for two years. We had taken it from a zero dollars north of like 1.5 million in bookings strategic OEM relationships, all the, you know, two dozen customers, all of this by five guys who had never run a business before, a first-time CEO, et cetera, et cetera. So when we got there and started working with particularly Peter Fenton, who I'm a big fan of and who over the years has been a great”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Talented and experienced executives, you can have top tier money, you can have all the things that usually make for a winning recipe and still not do it right. And so that's why we ended up bootstrapping hyperic actually for two years before we raised money ultimately from Excel and Benchmark who were great investors and helped us take this thing to ultimately a $420 million acquisition by VMware, which was a really good deal.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Great question. You know, I think the company's name was covalent. It was backed by Sequoia Capital, Menlo Ventures, and a bunch of other people. They had raised tremendous amount of capital. The business opportunity was correct. They were building a business around the Apache web server and all the nascent sort of open source infrastructure stuff that people take for granted nowadays. And the problem was they were following old rules. So New Market or new game old rules. They were doing a sort of typical top-down sales approach and the type of go-to-market dynamics usually reserved for the seabulls and oracles of the world. And you couldn't do that then. You can't do it now. So yeah, that was, I think, the biggest failure. And it was great proof, frankly, that you can have extraordinarily”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Elements and then end up joining VMware through their acquisition of hyperic and spring source, the company that we had merged with in 2009 and wound up being a CTO there specializing in software as a service and application services and that sort of thing looked a lot at mobility and productivity and so forth. And after leaving there that's sort of where the accomplice story began. I was doing an entrepreneur in residence thing at Red Point Ventures and almost reluctantly wind up doing something related to email.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “The company just hasn't done right by it. Let's see if they're willing to sell it to us for a dollar and we'll go and build a business our way around this. And it was a pretty odd way of transitioning from being a software developer to more of what I've been doing lately, which is becoming an entrepreneur, being a first-time CEO, and all of that. So through that, I did this company Hyperic, which is this thing we started with with a dollar. And that was in an era before seed funding and convertible debt and all these other fun things that people take for granted, built that out into a really good business. We were at the time when we sold it in 2009, close to 10 million in revenue, thousands of customers deeply, deeply adopted open source product and pioneer in some new business model.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Okay, yeah, so there was this company Netscape. I worked there, did a bunch of interesting things there. Some of it actually related to early internet email systems, wound up leaving there and going to a bunch of different startups, one of which I was chief architect at and had designed this infrastructure management monitoring product. And after that company failed in the sort of early part of the 2000, I guess I was 2004, I wound up coming up with this ridiculous idea to partner up with four other engineers that I had worked with at this company and buy out the product that we had built for a dollar. The company was failing, was about to shut down, and so me and these other guys decided, hey, let's, you know, we believe in this product. The market is there.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Sure. The quickest way to summarize it is I started off as a software developer. My first job out of university was at Netscape, which is kind of interesting given where I work now. And I hope you do remember Netscape, Harry. I don't know how old you are.”

    2015-09-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source