Rajat Bhargava

Starting NetGenesis at MIT

His first company began in a dorm-room era of the web. He told Mixergy: When we started NetGenesis, it was late ’93, early ’94, so I’m dating myself. The first web browser had just come out. So we were at MIT, and my cofounders and I immediately jumped on it. NetGenesis tried consulting and several products before settling on web analytics, measuring what visitors did on a website, years before that became a standard tool. Brad Feld has described it as his first angel investment.

A Run of Startups and Sales

He went on to co-found or back a series of companies, including Service Metrics and the email-tracking company Yesware. Asked which did best financially, he picked Service Metrics: It was an 18-month deal that was acquired by Exodus for $280 million. He measures success partly by the people those companies trained, pointing to alumni who went on to build Interliant and StillSecure.

StillSecure and a Directory Idea

The idea for JumpCloud came while he and Larry Middle were building the security company StillSecure. Their product needed to plug into each customer's directory, the system that decides who can log into what, and almost every customer used Microsoft Active Directory. Middle told The Tech Tribune that the two could not understand why the market had only one real player, played with the idea for a while and could not crack it. The timing was wrong, and the idea waited. I had this idea for JumpCloud probably almost 10 years ago, in 2007-2008.

By 2013 Google Apps, Amazon Web Services, Macs and Linux were common at work, but Active Directory still ran on servers in each office and centered on Windows. We said the, well, world’s not all that Windows-centric anymore. He and Middle decided to build a directory delivered from the cloud, talked to potential customers and launched what they called Directory-as-a-Service in late 2014.

Founding JumpCloud in Boulder

Even with his record, investors outside his circle passed. It’s a nice statement for people to say that, oh, we always bet on the team, but it’s not true. He said they worried about competing with the largest software company in the world, and about geography: We’re out of Boulder, Colorado. It’s not San Francisco. Feld's Foundry Group backed the company early, and the Boston firm OpenView Venture Partners invested after recognizing the pattern of an expansion-stage business software company. Early customers included CrossFit, FullContact and Yesware. JumpCloud is now based in Louisville, Colorado.

Writing The Startup Playbook

He wrote The Startup Playbook with Will Herman, a JumpCloud board member, because founders kept asking them the same things. we just kept getting the same questions from entrepreneurs over and over again. Asked on Mixergy whether success had ever made him a jerk, he said he hoped not and added: I think just being kind in general is a good thing to live by.