[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-Qmh708FUk&w=630&h=360]
Startup Grind Washington DC was happy to host the founder of MicroStrategy's Sanju Bansal, at 1776 campus. A very data driven discussion with a lot of DC love. MicroStrategy is a public traded company on the NASDAQ (MSTR) with almost $600 million in revenues with 3,200 employees worldwide and sells business intelligence, mobile software, and cloud-based services for some of the top Fortune 500 companies and technology companies in the world including Facebook, eBay, and Yahoo.
So what was his life lessons as an entrepreneur?
"Ideas are easy. Execution is not."
Sanju comes from a first generation Indian family - born in India, raised in DC. While studying engineering at MIT, Sanju became obsessed with the idea of cold coffee and its various recipes. After experimenting among his friends and family, Sanju found that distribution was his first fatal flaw in creating and executing a startup. Sanju went on to talk about ideas versus execution, saying that ideas are a dime a dozen, whereas execution is the most important part.
"Always work with a cofounder who are smarter than you... which doesn't necessarily mean your best friend"
During this time he met a fellow fraternity brother Michael Saylor, a "wickedly brilliant" guy that Sanju considers to be in his "top five of smart people [he] knows." Sanju believes you should bring on a co-founder who is smarter than you, so he teamed up with Michael, who had a near perfect score on his SAT and the valedictorian of his high school to go on to develop MicroStrategy. According to Sanju, MicroStrategy was drafted up through a class Sanju took called "System Dynamics Theory" at MIT. Upon learning social economic and business systems, Sanju became curious about modeling business systems through non-linear mathematics, as did Michael.
According to Sanju, having a co-founder was important to Michael in going forward with the business, but it drew upon a large amount of trust and energy between the two. Sanju does not suggest teaming up with your best friend to form a business, but really with someone who can compliment your talents and bring their own strengths to the table.
Sanju's Steps of Funding: "Customer financing, Employee financing (stock options) and then Institutional financing"
What better advice can any entrepreneur receive than from a founder of a publicly traded 'software' company that went IPO completely bootstrapped on its own merits. MicroStrategy was one of only six IPO'd software companies in the history of the stock market that took the alternate route of venture capital: customer financing.
He discussed the differences between customer financing, employee financing and institutional financing. Investment is tough gig says Sanju, being an "amateur VC" himself, and you need to know how your money will be spread around your company before you seek funding.
While Sanju was working at Booz Allen Hamilton, Mike got a $200,000 contract while working at Dupont that gave him the idea to spin out his own version of a company, bringing Sanju along with it. $100,000 was reinvested to finance the budding startup.
After becoming engrained within the Apple network through their initial work, Sanju and Michael were able to find more corporate clients through performing well and getting referred to other contracts. Sanju says to always do great work everyday, and always try to outwork and outsmart everyone else with some focus and dedication. That is how you succeed.
"Big Data is moving from causation to correlation"
Sanju then went on to speak about big data, and what it means for business intelligence. He talked about how McDonalds in 1994 had an industrial database of about 100 gigabytes, whereas nowadays eBay has 18 pedabytes. Data is growing quite rapidly which opens up thousands of opportunities in big data. Now, the trend in big data is the shift from causation to correlation in the data. Companies are focusing less on the 'why' of customer behavior and more on the 'when' of behaviors happen at the same time. To Sanju, he believes in "small data", or taking huge amounts of data and aggregating it to smaller "actionable" data sets that one can interpret and act upon.
The future of big data according to Sanju is security and governance, and figuring out how it fits into government and society and business. As big data becomes more accessible to the public and private sector alike, he believes it will be more interesting than ever to watch as industries are transformed thanks to this prevalence of data.
MicroStategy is now the data backbone (internal reporting and optimization) for Facebook, and powers their ability to target CMOs interested in advertising more on the social network.
"We came to DC to recruit top talent."
Sanju wrapped up the talk by saying that DC was the perfect place to relocate the company, especially for recruiting reasons since a lot of good talent inhabits the DC area (and not because Sanju always has season tickets to the Redskins).
Sanju's favorite figure is Mahatma Gandhi, since he was a person who faced utmost adversity with absolutely no resources, which to Sanju translate exactly to that of an entrepreneur.
[TechVoid]
http://techvoid.com/2013/08/13/startup-grind-dc-fireside-chat-sanju-bansal/
[Entrepreneurzine]
http://entrepreneurzine.com/sanju-bansal-microstrategy-at-startup-grind-washington-dc/
[Smashpipe]
http://smashpipe.com/tech/videos/B-Qmh708FUk
Written by: Cedric Craig, Community Manager