TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 Prov
TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 Prov
Alan: Hi, this is Alan Olsen and I’m here today with the CEO, Toby Olshanetsky, and Alexey Sapozhnikov. They are the CEO and CTO of prooV. Welcome to today’s show.
Toby: Thank you very much.
Alexey: Thanks a lot.
Alan: Okay, I’m gonna start with Toby. First of all, you’re the CEO of the company, but this is not your first company, correct?
Toby: No, we are serial entrepreneurs, both me and Alexey have been building enterprise software company for the last 23 years.
Alan: You know on American Dreams, we always love to hear serial entrepreneurs explain their visions and tell me the inspiration behind this vision, Alexey.
Alexey: Maybe to help the ecosystem. To help the other entrepreneurs to share our personal experience and to help it raise us.
Alan: So, Toby as we go through with prooV, how old is the company right now?
Toby: We started working on the company about two years ago, but we went live four months ago. And the whole idea for the plane of the company came, as I said, after 22 years of bored me and Alexey chasing CTOs and CIOs and Chief Innovation Officers and trying to convince them to open testing environments so we can do proof of concept. And what we saw is that in the accounts it started to be relatively easier to build technology, but very challenging how you convince a CTO to open a testing environment. So two years ago when we sold our previous company, we said “Look, this is a time to jump in and disrupt this ecosystem.” And we started working on prooV and four months ago we opened the beta for testing. And the reaction from the ecosystem is unbelievable, both from the enterprise point of view and from the starters point of view. We have right now in the platform, in about four months, we have 55 enterprises. Anywhere from fortune 100 to fortune 10,000. The running POC in different domains, it’s all enterprise software. So we have cybersecurity solution, BI, Big Data, APM, crash prevention, data storage. Basically anything that the enterprise is looking for in enterprise software. And we have got hundreds of startups from across the globe, from basically any part of the globe that’s on the platform. And the beauty of the platform that, for example, a startup here in Silicon Valley can do a POC with an enterprise in Australia. They don’t need to fly and they don’t need to go. And vise versa, a startup from Singapore would like to do a POC with an American enterprise he doesn’t need to waste his time flying and convincing this enterprise to do the POC. He can just come to our platform, sign in, find the right POC he would like to do and start immediately doing the POC. This is how dramatic and disruptive of what we are doing.
Alan: Twenty-three years, has it all been together in multiple companies?
Toby: Well, we’ve known each other for 23 years. We started this competition, my first startup and his startup he was working. We were competitors. You know, it’s best to know your enemies, so we took that working together. He had better technology, but I did better execution. Since then we are friends.
Alan: Seems like a good team here. Tell me about the name prooV, how did that come?
Alexey: Actually, in today’s situation, each people we startup for moving ahead needs to prove himself for the potential investors, customers, need to do POC he cannot avoid it. The interesting point is, enterprises are vehicles of innovation and opening innovation labs all across the world. So I think the name prooV is just a good sound for both parties to make the whole chain of POC to be a win-win situation.
Alan: So going back to Toby, how does a person get more information on your company or sign up to be a customer?
Toby: Very simple, you just go to proov.io, you sign in to the platform and we’ll take it from there.
Alan: Toby and Alexey, thanks for being on today’s show.
Alexey: Thank you very much, pleasure.
Toby: Thank you.
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