Mark Leslie: Veritas
In my years of working with entrepreneurs, I think one of the best bootstrapping stories I have ever seen is Mark Leslie’s founding and growth of Veritas: he and his team created a $1.5 Billion software company with a $4M investment. His experience repeats many themes we see in capital efficient, entrepreneur successes: the role of corporate partners; a cost effective sales model; and keeping a low burn to get to profits early. He also shows the importance of reinventing your company when things are going well. Mark show us that bootstrapping offers many benefits that can build market leading, franchise companies. I have known Mark for a long time and have always been impressed with him and his insights.
I hope you enjoy this story as much as I have!
http://sandhill.com/article/conversation-with-mark-leslie-founder-veritas-software-corp/
Return Leaders Series
About this Series
Founders: I meet a lot of entrepreneurs and a common issue that arises is that they need money to get going. Obviously all businesses need some level of investment but it is amazing how little capital was required by some of the biggest exits. Even those businesses that were capital intensive, essentially bootstrapped their market entry/development ( Intel with microprocessors: See Innovators Dilemma). My goal is to interview Founders of bootstrapped high value exits to find out how they were able to build such high value exits for so little capital. To gauge how capital efficient return leaders are we look at their exit value and divide it by total capital invested in operations. We ignore secondary share purchases and “hospitality money” – money raised but not invested. In the interviews I ask the question of how they did it, what they learned and what advice they would give. I hope you find their lessons as insightful as I have.
Comments