Online Positioning Roundtables for Entrepreneurs
In addition to the Entrepreneur Journeys series of books, Sramana Mitra offers a series of free online positioning roundtables to mentor and help entrepreneurs further develop their business ideas. In these roundtables, she also addresses financing strategy for each business.
During each 60-minute online session, entrepreneurs are invited to pitch Sramana their ideas in a three-minute presentation. She reviews the material in real time and provides feedback on each pitch, as well as addresses specific questions from the entrepreneur. Afterward, she takes questions from other participants. Each session is open to 1,000 people but only the first five to sign up have the opportunity to pitch Sramana and discuss their business in an interactive mode.
You can find more information about these webinars, recordings of past roundtables and registration links to upcoming sessions at:
www.sramanamitra.com/entrepreneurship-strategy-roundtables/
We hope you will join us!
Praise for Entrepreneur Journeys, Volume One
by Sramana Mitra
“Inspiration awaits readers in this volume of interviews with entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur Journeys will provide great insight into the questions and answers behind a start-up business. It succeeds in sharing the enthusiasm and sense of adventure of these technological pioneers.”
-Kirkus Discoveries
“Entrepreneurship is not a career. It is a way of life. And what better way to learn about it than to listen to people who have done it, successfully, and to learn about their lives in that fast lane? In a carefully structured set of interviews, Sramana Mitra gives the readers an opportunity to discover their paths, their successes, their setbacks sometimes, and the joys of meeting the immense challenges that have been theirs in a dizzying world where technical competence and management skills have allowed them to leave a deep and lasting mark.”
-Professor Elisabeth Paté-Cornell
Chair, Department of Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University
“Enjoyed Entrepreneur Journeys and found it worthwhile. The stories are inspiring and could have a significant influence on a student of entrepreneurship or an aspiring entrepreneur. To paraphrase a trite phrase; ‘Yes, you can!’ The stories are more than inspiration though. The insightful questions and the thoughtful answers give much guidance, and general wisdom. The book occupies a nearly empty niche between lightweight collections of anecdotes and ponderous but often irrelevant academic research. A great opportunity to come close to sitting with masters and learning directly.”
-Barrett Hazeltine, Professor of Engineering Emeritus, Brown University
“Sramana Mitra is herself a symbol of everything that is great about America: a geek, an entrepreneur, an immigrant, a leader. In Entrepreneur Journeys she has taken on the task of modeling how entrepreneurs transform economies into resilient, growing systems that provide a future for our children.”
-Stewart Alsop, General Partner, Alsop Louie Partners
“Sramana Mitra has gifted us with the first hand stories of industry legends who have succeeded with a combination of fierce resolve, self-reliance, and a willingness to buck conventional wisdom. The next generation of entrepreneurs has an invaluable reference guide on how their predecessors have succeeded.”
-Rick Rommel, Senior Vice President Emerging Business, Best Buy
Entrepreneur Journeys
Copyright © 2008 Sramana Mitra
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-4392-0687-2
ISBN-13: 9781439206874
Visit www.amazon.com to order additional copies.
Entrepreneur Journeys
Volume One
Sramana Mitra
To my father,
and his relentless faith in human potential.
Contents
i. Prologue
ii. Bootstrapping
a. Bootstrapping To Billions
Jerry Rawls, Finisar
b. Happily Bootstrapping
Sridhar Vembu, AdventNet
iii. Taking On Giants
a. Connecting With Your Intimate Bot
b. The Gap In Google’s Defenses
Steve Hafner, Kayak
c. Google’s Achilles’ Heel
Gautam Godhwani, SimplyHired
d. Vertical Ad Networks – An Emerging Trend
Russ Fradin, Adify
iv. Disrupting Business Models
a. The Next VMware
Philippe Courtot, Qualys
b. A Recession-Proof Corner Of The Tech Sector
Steve Singh, Concur
v. Addressing Unmet Market Needs
a. Latin America’s E-Commerce Leader
Marcos Galperin, MercadoLibre
b. A Technological Fix For Education
Edward Fields, HotChalk
vi. Tackling Planet Scale Problems
a. Hydro-Alchemy
Hans Peter Michelet, Energy Recovery Incorporated (ERI)
b. Mobile Microfinance
Carol Realini, Obopay
c. Lighting The Way In India
Harish Hande, SELCO
vii. Epilogue
Prologue
Entrepreneurship is not a career. It is a way of life.
For me, this journey began as a graduate student at MIT in 1994. The world watched Netscape go public a year later, and the Internet swept over us like a virus. As I wrote my Masters thesis, I also wrote my first business plan. We were, as a generation, shaping the Internet during those early years, and, my degree in hand, I was ready to jump into the unknown – from then on really, I have been jumping into unknowns at every turn.
Fortunately I’ve had great mentors – people who took an interest in my destiny, stopped along the way, and taught me a thing or two.
In turn, I have tried to stop along the way to pass on certain nuggets of my own learning. In the summer of 2006, as the technology industry resurfaced from the nuclear winter that followed the dotcom meltdown, I was invited to speak at a startup workshop. My session was supposed to focus on Positioning. At a Silicon Valley law firm, some sixty entrepreneurs packed a conference room to listen to me. I asked each to pitch his business idea in one minute, following which I gave feedback for another minute or two. My 90-minute rapid-fire session, alas, was not enough to accommodate all the pitches. In the lobby, even as we spilled onto the front steps, I tried to respond to some more, but it was hardly satisfactory. In fact, it has always frustrated me to realize that I did not have enough time in my day to stop for each entrepreneur who asked for guidance. Friends – seasoned entrepreneurs – have expressed the same frustration.
“Entrepreneur Journeys” is my attempt to capture that tribal knowledge accumulated in the private lives of great entrepreneurs – and give it shape, form, color, and a broad reach.
Imagine.
As you curl up in bed with this book of short stories, you are effectively transported across the table from each of the entrepreneurs, listening to their stories. You’ll learn, as I have learned, from their real-time experiences. All those dinners, lunches, coffees, teas, and glasses of wine from which so many stories have flowed – I invite you to experience them with me. Seated in the living room with Sridhar Vembu; lounging at Coupa Café in Palo Alto with Philippe Courtot; on the patio of Woodside Bakery, perhaps, your lunch companion is Russ Fradin.
Listen to their stories. Watch how they formulate ideas, navigate turbulent waters, create strategies, change directions, and make choices.
Listen. Learn. Empathize. Agree. Disagree. Develop your own point of view.
Most of all, I hope you find inspiration in these conversations – enough to help you become great entrepreneurs yourselves. For in entrepreneurship, I believe, lie solutions to many of the problems facing our modern world.
Bootstrapping
Bootstrapping to Billions
Gone are the effervescent days when Silicon Valley entrepreneurs bragged at cocktail parties about the millions they raised from venture capitalists. Gone are Super bowl ads and glitzy launch parties. That was so 1990s.
Now, entrepreneurs boast of funding their start-ups all by themselves, without help or hassle, from venture capitalists. I encounter more and more entrepreneurs who are perfectly happy bootstrapping their startups. They say it gives them more control over their companies, while cutting the dominant pressure to repay investors.
Gerry Langler, a general partner at OVP Venture Partners, puts it bluntly: “Venture capitalists have only one goal: they want to make money for their investors and themselves.” But entrepreneurs’ motivations are more complex.
There’s also a lot of proof that bootstrapping works. Just look at Craig Newmark, founder of the famous Craigslist classifieds. Newmark’s bootstrapped company has grown like a weed, generating revenues of $55 million in 2007.
Another solid example of the bootstrapping trend is Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Adventnet and proud parent of the Zoho software suite. Vembu self-funded his company, which in 2008 generates $40 million in annual revenues and sends $1 million in profits to the bank each month.
Other entrepreneurs have turned to bootstrapping after getting burned by venture capitalists. The founders of Software-as-a-Service start-up, Apttus, for instance, raised $60 million from VCs for their previous company, Nextance, then watched their shares dilute to less than 1%. This time around, they are trying to steer clear of VC money.
It may be common belief that bootstrapping can work for small businesses, but to build large public companies, you need venture capital, right? Not necessarily.
Twenty years ago, Frank Levinson used his own money to start optical components maker Finisar – and he’s never regretted his decision. “I founded Finisar 20 years ago on February 22, 1988,” Levinson recalls. “We had revenue of $6,000 in March of that same year – and had revenue from that point forward.”
Jerry Rawls, who a few months later joined Finisar as CEO, shared Levinson’s philosophy of building the company without venture capital. They both say the decision to bootstrap the company allowed them “to be market and technology patient”.
Finisar went public in 2000, 12 years after it was founded, with $67 million in sales, and almost no outside financing. “It was a really successful IPO,” Rawls says. “We went public at $19. The stock traded as high as $106 on the opening day and closed at $89. We were the seventh-largest increase on the first day of trading in the history of all the US stock exchanges. Our market cap was well over a billion dollars. I think our peak market cap in those days was as much as $5 billion.” Today Finisar makes over $400 million in annual revenues.
So you see, dear entrepreneurs, patience pays. And it pays to be patient on your own dime. VCs are not known for such patience. Their fund structures don’t allow them to invest with 12- to 15-year horizons in mind. They need to return their funds within 7 to 10 years.
Thus, if you do want VCs on board, try to involve them at later stages. Give them a small percentage of equity while maintaining as much control of your destiny as possible. But if you must take money in the early stages, work with the smart Angel investors who don’t hoist a ticking seven-year clock overhead.
This is not to say that bootstrapping is easy – it’s not – or that it’s the best strategy for all types of ventures. In fact, if an exploding market opportunity is staring you in the face and you want the fastest vehicle to play in that market, venture capital may well be your best path forward.
Good VCs can also be useful mentors if you’re an inexperienced entrepreneur looking for guidance. In addition to providing funding, VCs poke holes in strategies and business plans and hold entrepreneurs accountable for their decisions. Today’s Valley is chock-full of second-, third- and fourth-generation entrepreneurs who have benefited greatly from wise VCs.
But successful entrepreneurs spend a lot of time “experimenting” with new technologies, markets and business models to figure out what sticks. Involving VCs in the early phases of building is expensive, demanding, and could prove detrimental to the survival of a fledgling venture.
Jerry Rawls, Finisar
I had the opportunity to talk with Jerry Rawls, the CEO and co-founder of Finisar, about his experiences during the past two decades. While technology companies are accustomed to volatile market places and constant change, Jerry guided Finisar through arguably the most volatile market environment in history.
In this interview he takes us from the overheated days of the late 90’s, through the dotcom bubble burst where companies in the same market segment saw sales plummet by 98% in under a year, to today where Finisar stands as a global leader in optical components.
SM: Where I would like to begin the interview is to ask a bit about your background, before you started Finisar. Take us back to where you come from, where you grew up, your family, did you have entrepreneurial roots? JR: I am a Texan. I was born in Houston and I grew up in Texas. I went to the University of Texas Tech. I can’t trace entrepreneurial roots back very far other than that when I was a kid I always had jobs. I had a newspaper route when I was 10 and I always had jobs doing something, but I don’t remember starting much of anything.
I was in a junior achievement organization where we actually made soap and sold it to supermarkets and that was fun, we did that for a year. I went to college and studied mechanical engineering. Texas Tech was a great experience for me, the social and educational parts of it, and I also had some great summer jobs. I worked for IBM, Shell Oil, and US Steel during the summers.
I learned in that process that I did not want to be a design engineer, and though I was majoring in mechanical engineering it seemed the kinds of activities I would enjoy were more involved with people. I had been a bit of a student politician, a student body officer and a member of the student senate. I was a fraternity officer. I was a member of a lot of organizations, and, I don’t know, somehow maybe that steered me along that way.
At the time the Vietnam War was running hot and heavy, and Linden Johnson had just abolished what used to be known as the II-S (two “S”) scholastic deferment for education from the draft, but he had grandfathered everybody that was in school, and essentially what it said was you have four years to complete your degree, and after that you are subject to the draft, which at the end meant you were subject to going to Vietnam.
I did not want to go to war. And I decided that what I wanted to do was go to business school as opposed to more education in engineering, or moving into a job as a mechanical engineer somewhere. I went to business school at Purdue.
Anyway, it was a very quantitative MBA; everybody in the program was either an engineer or a scientist.
One of the companies that had interviewed at the school the year I finished was Raychem. I ended up joining Raychem and I actually moved to Menlo Park, California for a few months as part of a technical training program before my first job as a sales engineer in Chicago.
So, I went off to Chicago to be a sales engineer, and I did well at it and my customers grew and I sold a lot of Raychem materials. Then I moved to Dallas and became a Sales Manager, and then I moved to California and became a Marketing Manager. I progressed through the marketing management roles and became national sales manager and head of product marketing for our division, and eventually the division manager of a couple divisions of the company.
SM: What year does that bring us to, when you left Raychem? JR: About 1986 I would guess. In 1986 I was the general manager of a division called Interconnections System Division, in California, and in our division I started a fiber optics product development group because most of our customers were either computer companies or defense companies. Most of the wiring in their systems was electrical, it was copper wire, and they were expressing preferences to change some of their high speed signal connections to fiber and fiber optics, and at Raychem we had no fiber optics products.
So, we started a product development effort trying to understand how to serve our customers in the area of Fiber Optic transmissions, and as part of that I hired a young scientist from Bell Labs on the east coast and his name was Frank Levinson. Frank was a bright young PhD and he had a lot of patents at Bell Labs, so we moved him to California to be a principle technologist in this area, and he worked in that area for only a few months and then was transferred. Literally the Chairman and CEO of the company came in and said we are going to move this guy to a subsidiary they had just created called Raynet.
The Famous Raynet, and it is famous because it lost more cash than any other startup, I think, in the history of the Bay Area.
SM: The famous Raynet! JR: The Famous Raynet, and it is famous because it lost more cash than any other startup, I think, in the history of the Bay Area. They burned, I don’t know, $200 million in not too many years. It was a drain on the whole company, but Frank went over there.
Raynet was having trouble gaining success, and there were some of us around who were skeptical that it could ever be successful. Not only was the technical basis flawed but the whole notion of a company outside of the telephone industry being able to walk in and compete with AT&T was a little…well, ambitious, I might say.
So, anyway, the drain of Raynet on the company – and just Frank’s experience with Raynet and my experience with Raychem were such that we met one day and talked. Well, Frank wanted to go off and start a company. Actually he and I had talked about starting a company previously in a different area. So, he came back again and said, “Hey, I would like to start a company in fiber optics.”
So, we talked about it, and he said, “I am committed - this environment at Raynet is not positive, they are not going in the right direction.” He had become disenchanted with the progress Raynet was making, and thought life would be more fun trying to build our own company.
Well, let’s talk about this. There is no business plan. There is no particular product focus, and there are no customers. The only customers who were possible at the time were consulting customers, consulting in fiber optics.
SM: So to support the company initially, Finisar relied on providing consulting services. It’s a very common way that companies bootstrap themselves. I have done it myself. What kind of consulting did you provide? Like System Integrators? JR: Well, actually, the first customer would be Raynet themselves, but we would have to get others soon enough. We did not have any outside investors, so it was clear that we did not have enough money to support both of us. So, I stayed at Raychem and he went off and got started. At the end of the year I left Raychem and joined him fulltime.
Now, in the meantime I had worked nights, weekends, vacations. I made calls on customers, I visited several places to try to generate business, and I thought we had some opportunities for success. Anyway, this is getting to be a long story, but off we went, and we had a company and it was two guys, then it was three, and four and five and that was about it for a while. We did a lot of contract design services in those days to keep ourselves afloat. It was our money, we had bootstrapped the company, we had to be profitable, so we had to be able to cover our costs and that meant we could not expand much.
SM: So you were bootstrapping the company by doing consulting for a while – how long was that? JR: While we were doing product development we supported ourselves, probably, for four years doing mostly consulting work.
SM: Four years, that’s a long time. JR: We were doing product development in high speed fiber optics. Our product goal had become trying to develop high speed fiber optical links for computer networks, not telecommunications networks. At the time Alcatel, Nortel and Lucent in collaboration with Bell Corp, pretty well controlled the Telecom market for optical components and we did not think we could really compete with those guys given the limited investment that we had in this company.
So, we had to find a place where there was a need that was not filled, or need that we could see coming that wasn’t filled, and some innovation that we could bring to the opportunity. We targeted high speed networks – that is gigabit links for computer networks as opposed to telephony. We spent a fair amount of time with the workstation manufacturers at the time. Daisy, Apollo, IBM, Sun, and they all had very similar outlook, “We’re going to need more bandwidth for these workstations than we have today.”
The fastest connection they had at the time was fast Ethernet. So, we could see that Gigabit per second for connecting networks was a big deal, and our dream at the time was to be able to put an optical device on every PC and we still haven’t gotten there.
Along the way, in the early 90’s, IBM was defining a Fiber Optic link for computer networks they called Fiber Channel. These were the days when Akers was the CEO of IBM, and Fiber Channel, their vision, was going to replace Ethernet, Token Ring, SCSI. They would have one protocol and that would be Fiber Channel. Well, Akers got fired, Gerstner came in, and they decided this project wasn’t as strategic as they previously thought and they disbanded the project. Fiber Channel persevered, and it evolved into a storage networking standard, and it was the basis of the SAN market.
SM: Were you still working with IBM? Was IBM pushing the SAN market, or did you have to find other customers to do SAN with? JR: IBM was still participating, and they had a midrange computer group in Austin, but actually the company that saved Fiber Channel was Seagate. Seagate invested in the Barracuda Fiber Channel disk drive. It was a serial IO for a disk drive as opposed to wide bus SCSI disk drives that were previously available in the industry, so I would give Seagate the credit.
Our contribution was that we, in the early 90’s, had developed what we called a low cost gigabit optical link. We had introduced it. Actually we got a fair amount of press coverage over this gigabit optical link that was probably one tenth of the cost of a gigabit telephony link. And using that as the basis we drafted and revised the Fiber Channel standard so that a physical pair was defined as optical over multimode fiber, not optical over single mode fiber, and a wavelength was defined as a short wavelength that is typically 780 to 850 nanometers as opposed to 1310.
Now what that meant was that it enabled us to lower the cost of the link literally by a factor of 10. We had a lot of difficulty convincing the standards body to change the standard. I can remember a meeting in Austin that Frank and I went to, where we made a presentation about the work we had done and these high speed links we had built, and we showed slide after slide, and in those days there was no PowerPoint, it was all overheads (this was ‘92), and we showed the reliability of these links, the data transmission and the fidelity and all these characteristics.
At the time, in the audience, there were 225, maybe 250 people, most of them from Hewlett Packard, IBM, Sun, AT&T, Seagate, wherever, but there were guys in the audience that were knowledgeable in optics, and there were companies there who had presented papers saying what we were trying to do was impossible. I can remember in the meeting, a PhD from one of these big companies stood up and pointed to these slides and said, “You may have found one laser in the world that can do that, but you can never do it in production,” and we had to explain that we thought we were doing something important for their standard. The physical layer they had defined was so expensive that their standard would never be implemented; nobody could afford to implement it, while what we were proposing was a standard that could be one tenth of the cost and could be affordable.
SM: Did you think the objection he raised about the laser not being production possible was a defensive objection, or was it a real objection? JR: It was an ego objection. There were a number of people in the audience who had presented papers or had made presentations to their management saying that what we were trying to do was impossible. That gigabit data transmission over multimode optical fiber had an inherent bit error rate that was too high for reliable data networks, and therefore what we were doing was folly, it was cold fusion. Our explanation to them was that we thought we had done good technical work, had understood how to make these transmissions, understood where the limits were and how to modulate these lasers, but please buy our products, do your testing, and if we made a mistake tell us because we are not here to deliver cold fusion, we are here to help the standard become economical. We wanted it to be successful for our business and we wanted it to become successful for all of your businesses as well.
So, with that we went home and over the next three months we were visited by almost every major systems company in the world. Guys came from Europe, they came from Japan, all over the US, from every major computer company, and they all came to our little lab in Menlo Park, and they bought products from us and tested them.
The happy ending to the story was exactly nine months later – and it is ironic that it was nine months it took to deliver this baby – that the Fiber Channel standards group met in Minneapolis and they voted unanimously to change their physical layer standard to adopt our multimode transmission at short wavelengths as the basis of the fiber channel network. From there we took off, and the fiber channel standard was ratified in 1994 as a total standard. Starting in 1994, our sales doubled every year for seven years in a row.
SM: All of this you were still doing without outside money; it was still a bootstrapped company? JR: Still a bootstrapped company.
SM: Wow, that is incredible. JR: We went public in 1999.
SM: With no outside money? JR: Well, not exactly. In the summer of 1998 we actually sold 20% of the company to TA Associates and Summit Partners, Private Equity firms. We sold it because we were doing really well; we had been profitable every year since we were in business, and that was because we had to be profitable. In the summer of 1998 the IPO market shut down, and there were no more IPO’s. It wasn’t clear when it was going to open up again. The Private Equity guys came to us and worked a deal, said they were willing to buy a piece of the company at a relatively high evaluation.
This would put some money in our bank accounts because we had been in a mode of personal sacrifice now since 1988 trying to run this company. There were long periods of time when Frank and I did not pay ourselves any salary because we had to pay our employees.
I can remember only a few years ago somebody said, “Wow, you must be very proud that you built this company that has hundreds of millions of dollars of sales and thousands of employees around the world!” I said, “You know, the point I am most proud of is that we never missed a payroll.”
SM: What was the valuation that TA and Summit gave you at the time? This is the height of the bubble, right? JR: The bubble was still rising.
SM: Yes, 1999 was the height of the bubble. JR: So that was a pretty neat deal, we took money from them and we kept going. A guy from TA, Mike Child, joined our board of directors, and we worked toward an IPO. Our sales were still growing.
SM: What were your sales pre-IPO? JR: I think in the ‘98 period they were probably $30 million. Our fiscal year 2000, which is when we went public, was $67 million.
It was a really successful IPO: we went public at $19, the stock traded as high as $106 on the opening day and closed at $89.
In January of 1999 the IPO market came back. We did a bake-off with all of the bankers and selected Merrill Lynch to be our lead, and we scheduled and started working toward an IPO in October. It was a really successful IPO: we went public at $19, the stock traded as high as $106 on the opening day and closed at $89. We were the seventh largest increase on the first day of trading in the history of the US stock exchange. Our market cap was well over a billion dollars. I think our peak market cap in those days was as much as $5 billion.
SM: $67 million revenue with a $5 billion market cap? JR: Yeah, it was pretty unbelievable. Our sales in that fiscal year were $67 million, and then our sales in the next fiscal year were $188 million. So, we grew a lot in that year, but the world was booming still.
SM: And then it collapsed. JR: The whole market collapsed in 2000, 2001, and all of a sudden it was a whole new brand of reality. In early 2001, it was an unbelievable time: our sales were growing 30% a quarter; we could not find buildings to rent in Sunnyvale; we could not hire engineers fast enough; and our suppliers could not keep up with us.
Then the collapse happened, our peak quarter was $65 million in sales, that was the third quarter of 2001, which ended in January 2001 for us. In two quarters our sales dropped 47%, and that sounds horrible, but in the same period Nortel’s Optic division sales dropped 98%, and Lucent’s Optic division dropped more than 98%, and in the end Nortel literally gave their Optical division away.
SM: Did you have an option to buy that? JR: We did, but we decided that the amount of money it would take – remember this is an organization that had 1400 people, and it had $1.4 billion in sales in its peak quarter.
Remember the crazy thing is Corning, in ’99, had offered Nortel $100 billion in cash to buy this division. They turned it down because they thought it was not enough money. Now, in two quarters, their sales dropped from $1.4 billion to $23 million. It was a crash that nobody could manage their way out of, all you could do was try to unload it, get rid of the division and make somebody else deal with it. Nortel came to us and had chosen Finisar as being in a complementary industry. They said they would like to have us manage this division and have us be a supplier to them, because they knew they had all these sole source products designed into Nortel systems which were built in this division.
SM: Nortel had interest in survival. JR: Yes. We spent two weeks in Ottawa trying to figure out how we could assume this division, and could we operate it and turn it around and make it profitable when it was only going to start with $23 million in sales. We concluded the risk was too high for a little company like us and our shareholders.
There was going to be so much cash required because the business had big fabs in Ottawa, huge manufacturing facilities in the UK, and a cost structure that was so bloated that we did not think there was any chance we could have enough cash or raise enough cash to support it. We could not get Nortel interested in putting enough cash into the deal that we could see with certainty, the other end. They decided to shop it around, and they got Bookham to take it from them.
SM: In hindsight was that the right decision? JR: Absolutely. Bookham is still suffering negative cash flow trying to operate this business and trying to get it to recover. It has been a long, difficult time for them. I think we did exactly the right thing. We knew at the time that as this market had collapsed and revenues had come down, there was enormous capacity in the industry for optics, and I don’t know what the typical investment in optics in the 90’s was from venture capitalist, big corporations and from the public markets, but it had to be in the trillions.