Founding a startup is not for the faint of heart. Raising capital, building product, managing teams, winning customers, fending off competitors — the list goes on and on. Every successful entrepreneur knows you can’t go it alone, you’ve got to find strategic, committed, supportive partners that will help you through the tough times and propel you forward in good times.
SnapLogic found exactly that in Ignition Partners back in 2012. In the trenches together now for the past four years, the two have grown SnapLogic into what it is today and look forward to helping the company along its path to becoming a world-class cloud software company for the ages.
Reflecting on the partnership, SnapLogic founder and CEO Gaurav Dhillon sat down with the team from Ignition to share his thoughts on the daunting fundraising process, overcoming bumps in the road, and why Ignition is the ideal partner for SnapLogic. Gaurav is joined in the “Founder Stories” video by other Ignition portfolio executives including Laura Mather of Unitive, Godfrey Sullivan and Erik Swan of Splunk, Kumar Sreekanti of BlueData, Jonathan Gray of Cask and Amy Chang of Accompany.
Below are excerpts from Gaurav’s conversation with Ignition Partners.
On the daunting fundraising process:
“Your product gets examined, people need to take apart the idea and put it together again in front of your eyes. For a lot of founders and entrepreneurs, it’s very difficult to have someone sort of decompose your baby right in front of you.”
On what makes for a good venture partner:
“There are certain firms and certain partners who approach you as ‘the boss’; no bad news is ever allowed. The joke in the Valley is if you take money from ‘that guy’ you need a ‘VP of Management of That Guy’.”
On overcoming bumps in the road:
“At SnapLogic, we had to make some tough choices, we had to really take a different product approach than we had started with.”
On why SnapLogic partnered with Ignition Partners:
“A lot of folks in the venture capital business are well connected but less and less of them have the sense for how to build a great company, how to build something that is durable, who really take pleasure in helping someone grow. That’s when you start to say – ‘who’s going to be the best person for us on our journey’. And make no mistake, all companies, especially successful ones, are on a journey and they have to deal with the twists and turns of what is going to happen in the marketplace. In the case of Ignition, this team had all come from operational backgrounds, they had been in my shoes, they had run big products and big companies.”
To watch the full videos, please click here and here.
