Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / He Quit Cisco at 42 and Went $0 to $1M in 11 Months | Didi Gurfinkel

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He Quit Cisco at 42 and Went $0 to $1M in 11 Months | Didi Gurfinkel · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

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had pretty impressive background and I came from executive position
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in well-known company. So I thought,
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okay, what can go wrong? And realized that it's tough.
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It's tough, I get to pitching VC.
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~
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and I meet other founders, maybe 15,
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20 years younger than a different pitch,
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technology, come with all your background,
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but when the investors listen to your pitch,
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they evaluating the idea, the market,
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the concept, team.
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I left behind successful career and now I'm building something that failure
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is not an option.
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In one week, we got more customers than we acquired in five years.
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Don't tell stories to yourself or to your team look at the numbers hard evidence
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and
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make decision only by that,
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All right, Didi Gurfinkel welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
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Thank you for having me and my pleasure
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Yes, yes. We appreciate you taking the time.
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so Didi you're the founder and the CEO of Data Rails,
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and you've had that company eleven years,
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and we're just talking off camera too about kind of the journey of that company.
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It was a bit of a rocky start.
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And you've got you've got quite an interesting story and backstory how
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you became an entrepreneur. Can you just share that to set the stage
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for our audience and and talk about your backstory and how
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you became an entrepreneur?
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so in my background, I'm a software engineer.
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I started as a programmer for almost 10 years,
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got to a VPR and DIN, some mid-size company,
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and then I moved to more, let's say,
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management position as a COO in a company that acquired by Cisco.
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In Cisco, I spent a few years,
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spent a lot of time on my bike,
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biking for hours on a daily basis.
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And then I decided at the age of 42,
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which is maybe a little late, to start a company to solve a problem that
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I saw in Cisco, how organizations can actually manage spreadsheets,
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or what we call the Excel hell.
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And then I left Cisco I was an executive at Cisco
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some benefits that until today I don't have the same level of benefit that they
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had 11 years ago and the work-life that you can dream of.
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I started the data-virus with some very weird and unique concept.
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Take all the organizational spreadsheets and connect them into
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one centralized database. That was the concept and then try to
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do something with Excel.
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I started I thought that it would be like...
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few months until I get my seed money to run the company.
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And then, you know, I had like a very clear path of running business.
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had pretty impressive background and I came from executive position
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in well-known company. So I thought,
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okay, what can go wrong? And realized that it's tough.
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It's tough, I get to pitching VC.
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~
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and I meet other founders, maybe 15,
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20 years younger than me, a different pitch,
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different technology, and I'm almost starting from zero.
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come with all your background,
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but when the investors listen to your pitch,
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they evaluating the idea, the market,
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the concept, the team. it took me a few months to raise seed or pre-seed.
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the money and then we developed the technology we developed some platform
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and we started to try and get some traction to sell something
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it was tough because we came out with some very wide some huge idea
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of let's save the world from spreadsheets and we couldn't find
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specific use case of specific problem that we solved.
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succeeded bring a customer here and customer there,
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some money from here, some money from there,
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nothing was repetitive. Nothing was you can predict the next quarter,
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the period.
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We couldn't find what everyone knows as the product market fit.
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We had technology, we had product,
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kind of product, was a market,
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are billion Excel users in the world,
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but we couldn't find fit.
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Okay. All right. Well, let's stop right there because we're going to come back
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to that. But your career trajectory.
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So you start off as a programmer,
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you work your way up, VP level,
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you're a COO, your company gets acquired by Cisco,
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you stay at Cisco for a few years,
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you're an executive there. Like you said,
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you've got nice benefits, good salary,
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you have your work life balance,
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right? A very successful corporate career.
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by all accounts. And you're 42 years old,
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so you decide to leave all that to start this company,
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let's just go to that decision.
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So clearly you saw an issue where you thought you could solve it and
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you had this desire to really build something.
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when you're in that you've been,
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corporate your whole career, you have stable position in finances,
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like what's the decision like in your head where
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You're deciding to leave all that to start a company at forty two years old.
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Like what what's going through your mind at that point?
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Yeah, so it's a great question.
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I had lot of time to think about it.
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As I said, I biked like two or three hours a day.
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Road bike and mountain bike I spent a lot of time with myself.
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if we put it in simple words, so I got bored.
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It was almost...
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too easy, not that it easy to be an executive in Cisco to build a career,
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but it was a safe environment that I know that in my next job I will succeed.
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There is no...
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Failure almost no chance to fail in this path,
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right? You a new job you get one year to if you're not happy you you move
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to the next job, so failure is almost not significant risk and I Looked
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for some meaning I believed in my skills in my
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Potential I said, okay, I'm too young age of 42 to start to you know
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to slide slowly to the to the end of my career and I said this is what I will
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do for the next 20 years or 25 years.
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Something is missing
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so I decided to bet on all of it.
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I mean, it's a huge bet very significant bet because As I said
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you start from nothing I mean you have your reputation,
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of course the experience but everything is challenged everything if you
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cannot bring customers and you cannot create the momentum and you cannot
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get to the round. So You fail and you start from zero.
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So it was tough decision, I do not regret and I even very difficult
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and challenging years of...
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walking in the desert and looking for the product market fit,
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think haven't even one moment of regret about this decision.
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Okay. All right. So appreciate that context because like you said,
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you're an executive at a company that's so big where you felt like there's
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no chance of failure. It was boring at times.
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You were really searching for meaning.
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You thought you were kind of too young to really just have this be the rest
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of your career. You had this desire to build something.
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you knew it was gonna be tough,
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but you went ahead and did it.
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And you even mentioned earlier too that you thought it was going to be
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a lot easier than it actually was.
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every entrepreneur too has these visions of just kind of straight straight straight
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Yeah. Yeah.
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up, like this is gonna work.
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And so, like once you made the decision to to leave Cisco and
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you launched this company, what was the the biggest surprise when
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you first launched the company that you encountered?
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My biggest surprise was interaction VCs that before that
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I had like some...
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interaction with the VCs in terms head hunting,
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get offering for jobs to lead this,
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to lead that. So I had some perception of VC.
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And once I get in front of a VC as an entrepreneur or founder that
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are looking money, funding,
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was very surprised that like in a race it's like a completely fair race,
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right? You come with basket, right?
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experience, team, product, vision,
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your skills, but everything is
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Challenging right they challenge you in everything they measure everything from
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scratch when you come to interview for your next job in your career path
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So you start from a certain point,
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right? They do not ask you like a algorithms question when you are kind going
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to a CEO or VP R &D product that you start from a certain stage and You go
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up in the ladder but here
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need to give answers or explanations Pitch their your idea a way that
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you need to convince them that you are better than then 20 I don't know
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25 26 years old that they they met half an hour before you came
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And they look at you, at this young guy,
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20 years younger than you, With the same lens.
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measured like everyone else without all this,
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background everything. So that the surprise and a little bit frightening,
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right? It was like, okay,
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I start almost from zero.
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Okay. All right. So clearly just I I guess dealing with the brutal reality
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of what it's like dealing with like venture cap firms that obviously they have money
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to invest and you're pitching them,
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and it's all about will this idea work?
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I mean, obviously they're betting on you as well,
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and you're competing oftentimes with people much younger than you.
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that whole process was difficult.
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you mentioned too the product market fit.
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It took a while to find that. you described it as wandering through the desert,
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this was for years, is that right?
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Yeah, we started from a, not even from technology,
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from a concept, Excel is a personal tool.
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Let's try to make it like an enterprise tool by how,
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by connecting to a database. Okay,
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that was the concept. Like very wide,
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target ~ a market of a billion Excel users.
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Okay, something huge. And...
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to narrow down concept to a product or to use case,
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it was something that was very difficult for me because thought that it was like,
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okay, I don't want to give on something.
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I want to take everything. I don't want to narrow it.
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I want to keep it wide. once understood that we need to focus,
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need to narrow
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it, now we have to start to find out what is this focus,
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what is this use case can solve and make it repeatable and predictable running.
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That was the
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Okay.
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And how long did it take you before you found the product market
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fit and you actually started getting sales?
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we had very non significant sales.
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the first five years, but only after five years we started the company 2015
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the real customers started in 2020 five years later and during these years
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we raised another almost 10 million dollar with
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a lot of conviction we had like some sales here and some sales there
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and because the idea was very big and the market that we target was
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Our investors, we succeeded to convince them that there is something there.
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There is something in our idea.
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There is something in the market that once we will find the crack.
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will fly and that was what happened in 2020.
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But they were, I don't know, smart enough or brave enough to believe
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we believed continue to invest.
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And so the total investment before the product market fit was $10 million.
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By the way, today it doesn't sound so significant,
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but back then it was significant money seed investment
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man.
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And when you're going through that process,
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what's the internal pressure like when outside investors have committed that type
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of capital cause they believe in you and your idea and your vision
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and you're going years without any significant sales?
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I mean, what's that internal pressure like when,
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they expect a return on that and it's on you as the founder?
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it sounds difficult
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'cause yeah, I'm sure you didn't plan it to work out that way.
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It was very difficult, very difficult from many aspects.
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One, I had a team of 10 people,
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20 people, 25 people, different period,
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different size of the team, but it was very,
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very challenging to keep the team motivated and keep the team
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in the belief that we are in the right way,
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although,
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we changed the way, five, six,
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seven times. So it's not only that you need to convince them that you're
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in the right way now, you need to convince them again after a few months that,
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no, that wasn't the right direction.
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Now we are in the right direction,
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right? So it was taking the team from pivot to pivot
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was super challenging, super challenging.
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this is one aspect.
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In the personal aspect, of course,
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it's super, challenging. I put so much venture,
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not just in terms of money and risking my pension and everything,
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it's about.
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my career, I left behind a successful career and now I'm building something that
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failure is not an option. And in any time of these five years,
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I could see the failure around the corner,
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It's always there, exists, and you go to sleep with this possible failure
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and you wake up with this possible failure and it's tough.
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deliver have the resilience, that you are strong enough for your investors,
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for your team, for your co-founders,
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for everyone. it's tough, it's very challenging meet time to time founders.
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in period looking for product market fit,
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pivoting and stuff, really try hug them.
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And
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~
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to say, okay, very tough. I mean,
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it's very tough and it's very challenging.
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And yeah, well, you look in retrospective so you can see the path and
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you can see how you got to the product market fit and the success
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of the company after all this channel,
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but sometimes doesn't work,
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Well, then that's so interesting because like you said,
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every founder has that mindset of failure's not an option.
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And especially when you get outside investment and you're the leader,
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you have to be strong out front and regardless of what's going on inside.
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But then like you said, when you're looking at reality,
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failure's right around the corner,
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so often when when you're going through that period of of trying to find,
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you're
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right fit. So I mean, was there ever a point in time where you thought about giving
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up?
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No, no, and not because I'm so,
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strong mentally or strong from a resilience point of view,
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because...
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I put so much on this company,
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on this venture that couldn't afford declare a failure.
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So if was the reality, I had nothing to do but give up,
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it wasn't even an option. Really,
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not just saying in retrospective,
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yeah, was, no, it wasn't even an option.
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Okay. All right. So twenty twenty you really find your product market
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fit and things start to take off.
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So tell us about what happens from then on.
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So like like founders and stories,
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again, the money is left only for a few months of runway.
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got another extension of a few hundreds thousands of dollars from investors
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to extend runway.
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We tried something and then it failed and I get back my major investor
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and I said, look, let's be fair.
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We got this extension to try something.
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And it didn't work. So let's be fair.
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If you want, let's, there is still some money in the bank account.
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So take it back. you put it for something,
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it failed. So take it back. And he said,
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no, try something else. try to get use of the,
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the left of your runway.
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And then we tried thing. I mean like any other Pivot that we did before that
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I hope that we got smarter and smarter from Pivot to Pivot,
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right? We get close to First we get to let's focus on finance and then focus
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on mid market. So, we got closer and closer and then We got to our
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core product till today, the FPNA solution.
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And we said, okay, let's be an FPNA solution.
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And we started to sell the same platform,
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the same technology, the same everything,
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but with a different website and a different sales pitch.
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And...
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In one week, we got more customers than we acquired in five years.
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So there wasn't even any question about that
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we got on something.
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And then we started to increase,
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you know, to get more account executives and get more traction.
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And then the COVID hit and we thought that it's the end of the world,
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but pretty soon after a few weeks,
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we saw that many tech companies,
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that is a huge opportunity. So the sales continue to grow.
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And we got from zero to one million in 11 months and then from a
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to five million in the following year and then 16 and then continue
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to a very impressive pace.
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Wow. So you're literally like almost out of money.
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it sounds like you almost feel guilty where they gave you some investment
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to try a particular product that didn't work and you even offered to give it back.
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And they said, nah, it's okay,
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just try something else. you literally repackage the same offering just kind
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of into a different market.
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Nothing else had materially changed.
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from then you get more customers in one week than you had the whole previous five
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years.
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And it really just takes off from there.
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So like you said, zero to a million in eleven months,
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one to five million the next year,
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and then on from there. And then COVID really with everyone kind of being work from
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home that really helped with your tech offering for even further.
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was in the middle the first year and I cannot measure if it helped or
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not because it was like a continue of the growth so it didn't stop
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problem with the COVID was that suddenly everyone works from home,
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right? Today we used to it, so it sounds obvious,
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mean, after so many years of working in a very tight and closed team together
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in the same office, now everyone from home.
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it looked like, okay, it's impossible to run a company that way,
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right? And today we have
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hundreds of employees that most of them work in a fully remote mode.
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Okay. All right. And so what's the company look like present day as
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far as your offering, where your position and and where you're headed?
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So FP product, once we saw the traction and we have like
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the product market feed with the market product,
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we started to go back to the platform concept and we started to
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add more products from management,
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mountain clothes, the ticketing,
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and we added more and more products top of the
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our platform and we became like the fastest growing company in this space
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in North America and then once AI in the three three and half years
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ago arrived to our world we actually became the platform that
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the foundation for AI so if you want to use AI you put our platform
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AI in finance you put AI you put our platform and then you can use Claude
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and the Chat GPT
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to run your finance and today we are in a very very strong position
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as the foundation for AI in finance.
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get back the foundation, the platform approach with.
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All right. And given that whole experience too from,
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making the leap of entrepreneurship,
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it not working out at first the way you thought it would,
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the the wandering in the desert,
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the refusal to give up, and then all of a sudden something clicks
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and you really find your right fit and things just take off.
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And now you continue to grow and you've expanded and
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you're the foundation for AI and the finance space with Excel and
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all these other good things that have come along.
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what's the most important lesson you've taken from this whole experience?
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to look very, very...
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carefully and in a very View Look at that the brutal truth Don't tell
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stories to yourself or to your team look at the numbers hard evidence and
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make decision only by that,
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not lead your company stories or something that you believe facts,
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facts, facts, and be, candid enough authentic enough to look at the brutal truth.
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so you can fix things fast and double down on things even faster.
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Love that. Didi, if people want to find out more about Data Rails
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or connect with you, what what's the best way people can find you online?
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go to our website datarails.com
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All right. Well Didi thank you so much for taking the time to be here
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and sharing all this incredible wisdom from your journey with our listeners.
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We greatly appreciate it.
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Thank you, David. It was my pleasure.