![]() So I said, “Hey, it would be interesting if I could check out what your sales team is doing.” And I actually ended up being hired in the sales team. You should check it out.” So not thinking much about it, I flew down to do the interview for an engineering position, but then I discovered they were hiring across the board. ![]() He called me up and said, “Hey, we’re hiring and you’re a resourceful guy. He was one of the ones that moved to Silicon Valley. So a friend that I’d gone to college with actually called me up. It was kind of a classic story of right place at the right time. You said one of the frustrations was that you felt more invested in the business than even the people who were running the business and then it got sold. You were working hardware design at a startup. And the idea came from a company you’re working in. So that’s really how I got the bug.Īndrew: It does. And of course, Silicon Valley blends business and technology together. I really thought I would be applying my skills to something, either science or tech. ![]() I never even considered starting a business. Growing up, I’m sure you’ve heard this, growing up in an Indian family, I had two choices. I’ve got a degree in computer engineering. So I really think I came out of an academic family. There was a lore of technology startups and a lot of misinformation about kind of the Hollywood lifestyle of what it takes to start a company, and it wasn’t until much later when I started visiting on business trips and things like that, that I kind of got the sense for this is how real companies are built and what the story behind the story was. I grew up, I guess, most recently in Canada before I moved to Silicon Valley. I’m not even sure if I knew what the Silicon Valley thing was. Why is it that when your friends were coming here to Silicon Valley you said, “That’s not me”? I don’t want to be a Silicon Valley guy.” Take me back to the dotcom boom. And you were a guy who when you were looking at the world said, “I don’t even want to be a part of this Silicon Valley thing. So this year we’ll do about just shy of $30 million in revenue.Īndrew: $30 million in revenue. Why don’t we skip the end for a second here and just say revenues today, where are they, if you don’t mind sharing them? I had no idea what was going on behind the scenes until I started doing research and my producers talked to you. I’m excited to talk about kind of the whole story of YouSendIt and Hightail.Īndrew: Me too. But first, I’ve got to welcome the founder of Hightail. The second has helped me and people in the audience close more sales. The first will help you hire your next great developer. We’re going to find out how this company started, grew, evolved, became what it is today and it’s all thanks to great sponsors. The way they do feedback is really cool, especially when it comes to like images and videos.Īll right. You can easily send and share large files securely and get feedback all in one place. Hightail is software that enables professionals like you, you the person who’s listening to me, to collaborate on creative projects. This is an interview about what happened to that business and more importantly about the whole lifecycle of a business, what happens to a company as it starts, evolves with the world and continues to grow. So I’ve been wondering what happened to that business. Big companies like Google are even enabling it. It’s becoming easier and easier to send large files. Man, did they really need to evolve because the world changed. ![]() The company did really well, at least for me, but I wondered were they profitable and what happened to them and how did they evolve. My past guests, like the founder of PostSecret, used to send me video files of themselves using YouSendIt. I think my use of it predates my use of Gmail, or else I’d be able to go back and find more. I went back into my inbox and I see lots of use of this program, this app, YouSendIt, going back to 2007. It was just such an amazing thing to see. Imagine if I had that back when I was sending large video files or large files of any kind. She used this service called YouSendIt.Īnd my eyes were suddenly opened up. She’s probably going to send it in an envelope.” But no. Sending a large MP3, one of the motivational stuff and instruction that she sent her partners at Mary Kay, was too big to send by email and I thought, “She’s never going to be able to send it. I remember this woman who ran a Mary Kay group wanted to send me an MP3. I would go into religious organizations-I just wanted to see how do people organize themselves. I was kind of taking a break from internet companies and going around and exploring how different organizations run themselves, like I would go to Mary Kay to see how Mary Kay runs their organization. It goes back before I even started Mixergy. I get shivers as I think about today’s guest, because I remember when I first used his software.
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