How to start a billion company

What do many entrepreneurs do when they sell a multi-million dollar company? Establish another. That is what happened with Andrei Baronov and Ratmir Timashev. When they sold their first company, Aelita Software, they got the idea to create a new project, and so Veeam Software appeared.

It all started with a tiny room in one of the business centers of St. Petersburg, where only three desktops were located. Why not rent a large office in Singer’s house, did you have the money? It's simple. The founders of Veeam worked on the principle of "start-in-garage" ("start-in-garage") - the creation of the company and the first profit at the lowest cost (about this principle is told in detail on the intensive educational program Start in Garage for entrepreneurs engaged in business Internet, cloud services and software development).

As a result, Veeam Software began to build with a small room, several tables and a computer for $ 600. Here’s what Veeam’s first data center looked like (Photo 1):

Photo 1. The first data center of the company Veeam Software, 2006. This is where the virtual domain controller, mail server, file / print server fit. The total cost is $ 600.

For the same reason, it was decided to virtualize the server. Why buy multiple physical machines, if everything can be run on one and save? This solution seemed particularly successful, because if the number of users increased by a factor of 100, upgrading the infrastructure would be reduced simply to buying several new servers and migrating virtual machines. As a result, the virtual infrastructure of the startup Veeam Software included three virtual machines with three employees, and all the company's network equipment was reduced to the presence of the legendary D-Link DES-1008D switch.

Photo 2. The first network equipment of Veeam Software, 2006, is the D-Link DES-1008D switch. The total cost is $ 30.

By the way, the choice of virtualization for its servers later played an important role in what Veeam Software is doing today.

First product

Virtualization reduces costs, saves time and generally facilitates the work of administrators. However, there were several problems. In particular, copying files from or to an ESX host required setting up additional services and was quite slow. The idea to simplify this task for the administrator came by itself, and the developers decided not to miss it. So the first product of Veeam was the free FastSCP program, which made it possible to quickly and conveniently copy .ISO / VMDK files between an ESX server and a Windows machine. FastSCP turned out to be very, very popular and helped the company quickly gain the trust and favor of VMware users.

To date, FastSCP is used by more than 170 thousand system administrators in different countries of the world. All this is due to the fact that the product solved a real, rather than a made-up problem, which 100% server virtualization in its own IT helped to find.

Veeam today

Since then, virtualization has been a central topic in the Veeam business. For 6 years, from a small company with three employees, the company has become a large international company, a leader in virtual machine backup. The main product of the company - Veeam Backup & Replication today protects more than 4 million virtual machines worldwide. Eventually:

• Veeam Backup & Replication received more than 20 international awards;
• It employs more than 1 thousand employees;
• The company has 17 international offices (the central office is now located in Switzerland, and headquarters are located in Ohio, Paris and Sydney).

Photo 3. Veeam booth at the VMworld 2012 conference in San Francisco, USA

The history of the development of Veeam Software is a vivid example of how it is useful to confront ambitions with reality. The founders of the company were clearly aware that at the start the company had crumbs in the asset, but they were not afraid to acknowledge the circumstances and accept the working conditions as they are. At the same time, they remained faithful to their dream all the time - to build a company for a billion.

So how do you start a company for a billion?

• Do not be afraid to start an IT business in the absence of money. Their absence or a small amount only stimulates the search for new progressive solutions;
• Save on fundamental things. Do not rent an expensive office, do not rush to buy expensive equipment and hire expensive employees;
• Find your niche. This is especially important with a minimum budget;
• Buy the same equipment that customers use the company, even if it is not the best. This will help to take their place, and therefore find a problem, the solution of which you can offer them. There is a problem - there is a solution, prepare and sell it.