What I would say is as you continue to need more capital down the line, raising money was always challenging. It ended up not being too much of a chance to raise some initial capital. I think there was a lot of interest in bringing your products to life, creating new companies in that category. Business communication, as one of these 8 billion dollar markets now, and many of the products are very, very old, outdated, and antiquated. The second part of it was this was a big market. A lot of that was our history and the work that we have done in the past. For us, raising some of that initial capital was not terribly challenging. I was fortunate where a couple of prior successes and being associated with Microsoft and Google ended up being a significant asset in raising capital. Martin: Shan, how hard was to raise the money? The first few months were critical for laying the foundation for what we were ultimately going to create. We have got over a thousand customers now and we are essentially working on the same idea that was a genesis for the company so that we have not had any major pivots or anything like that. After three years now what was amazing to see is that those ideas that we are working on in a small room together have now led to a company that is now 70 people. Three years later, we are working on substantively the same exact problem. The thing that is interesting and, I think, maybe for everyone who is listening to us right now, the thing that was interesting was that we had this insight for a product and we put together our initial plans within those first two to three months. Just within the first couple of months, we secured some initial funding from some great investors here and we really just focused on product definition. When we ultimately left Google the first two to three months was going from two people, my co-founder and me, to around eight people. We put some definition around what product we are going to build and on recruiting an initial team. The first two or three months we spent time securing some initial investment. The first couple of months were spent figuring out what that key insight was, how we were going to structure our product, what was going to be important to our product, what was not going to be important almost as critical. The average person was using video one to two times a day. The question that we asked was what made video work across all those 40,000 people? Just to put it to perspective, at Google we were doing 20,000 video calls every single day. The first question we asked was, well, what was it that made video really work in that environment in the way that we saw it at Google. The first few months when we stumbled on to our observation that there is a big opportunity here there are a bunch of questions that we asked. Martin: Can you walk us briefly through the beginnings of Highfive? Once you have left Google what the first two or three months look like? We decided to start Highfive based on that inside and that is what led to what we are doing now three years later. When we saw that, we were convinced that every other company in the world would communicate the way we did at Google. All of that technology that enabled that was made through a bunch of homegrown systems that we had created there. Most companies still use conference calls and the telephone to talk to each other but at Google we use video. They communicate differently than every other company in the world and what we ended up seeing at Google was a company that decided to use video as their primary way to talk to each other. Where the idea for Highfive came from was a bunch of things that we saw on Google. A Google, I was running Google enterprise apps where we were bringing cloud-based email to companies and so where the idea for Highfive was a long way of getting to, the idea of Highfive. I started a company in collaboration space backed up by Google. I’ve been in the world of communication and collaboration for a pretty long time now, going on 12, 13 years starting at Microsoft where I worked on a couple of products there. Shan: We started the company just over three years ago. Martin: When did you start this company and what made you come up with this business idea? We build an all-in-one hardware software video and web conferencing tool for businesses of any size. Hi, Shan, who are you and what do you do? Martin: Today we are in Redwood City in the Highfive office. Shan talks about his story how he came up with the idea and founded Highfive, how the current business model works, as well as he provides some advice for young entrepreneurs. In Redwood City (CA), we meet CEO and Founder of Highfive, Shan Sinha.
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