Gleb Budman

Definitely no private jet money.

So we decided to do Backways differently.

Instead of raising funding from the beginning, five of us actually quit our jobs.

We committed to each other for one year, no salary, put a little bit of money into the company.

What's a little bit?

How much?

It was a couple hundred K total between all of us.

So really not a lot.

And the idea was that

If you try to raise funding from the very beginning, one is you end up giving away a lot of the company, you spend a ton of time trying to raise funding, you end up giving away control as well as dilution, and you start building a culture which ties yourself to raising funding all the time.

And what we really wanted to do was build a culture where people all felt

like we need to build a business where each customer matters revenue from customer matters margin matters and you and it's a real business so what have you raised to date still bootstrapped mostly so we've raised a total of three million okay that's fair and so you're trying really hard to hold out but something gave what you had to raise a couple million when was that what year and why'd you raise

So we went for one year with no salary, put a little bit of money in, no raise.

And then we decided that every half year we would meet as a management team and talk about whether we should raise.

Our business is very capital intensive.

We have to buy storage servers and hard drives for all of our customer data.

And at this point, we are storing about half as much data as Dropbox.

So it's a huge amount of infrastructure.

And so we have to pay for that somehow.

And so we raised a small 350K round in 2009 from friend and family, angel type people, including the co-founder of VMware, the head of AdWords engineering at Google, some other friends and family.