Our portfolio company Soha Systems, an innovator in enterprise secure access delivered as a service, was acquired by Akamai this past fall. When we first met Soha’s founder, Haseeb Budhani in 2013, it was clear he had a big vision and a detailed plan on how to grow a successful company.
At Cervin, we try to provide our portfolio companies with as many tools and resources as we can. We believe it is vital for entrepreneurs to hear from other founders like Haseeb, which is why we’re excited to announce the launch of the Cervin Ventures Podcast. We recently sat down with Haseeb for our inaugural episode.
You can also listen to our conversation here.
Haseeb spoke about a number of the unexpected challenges they faced along the way:
“Selling is not easy. Building products is easy. We’re good engineers. I’m a good product manager, I can build anything, but selling is hard. Getting people to really appreciate value is very hard. Sometimes you find value in all the unexpected places.”
“More often than not what you have to figure out is just because one customer bought it doesn’t mean 1,000 will buy it. How do you figure out this is a product that 100 customers will buy? How do you get to 10 real customers who are paying you real, material, meaningful money? Just having a sense for that before you start selling is important.”
Throughout the year, we will be speaking with others influencers in the enterprise tech space to share their perspectives with you. Stay tuned.
