Soltero: Sequoia wrongly called Hyperic a product in search of a market
Javier Soltero · FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft · Sep 6, 2015 · at 15:17
Javier Soltero (co-founder of Hyperic and Accompli) reflects on Sequoia Capital's early skepticism regarding Hyperic.
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“Maybe that comment from Sequoia had really left a mark, this idea that, 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”
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“Venture capital is not a true market in the sense that it's a very limited number of players often colluding with and really incestuously sort of managing deal flow back and forth, and it works.”
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“They were doing a sort of typical top-down sales approach and the type of go to market dynamics usually reserved for the Siebels and you know, oracles of the world, and you couldn't do that then, you can't do it now.”
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“I'm certain that most people you know, 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.”
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“Painkiller products fall under a class of product that is 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…”
Soltero: Ability to raise capital is a shallow founder metric
“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.”
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“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 you know, ultimately a four hundred and twenty million dollar acquisition by VMware, …”