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A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Vlad Shmunis, the founder and CEO of RingCentral. The full interview is included above. Born in Odesa located in the Ukraine, he and his family immigrated to California while in High School.
He founded RingZero in 1992 and eventually sold it to Motorola in 1998. RingCentral emerged a few years later in 2003 and they have been rolling along since then. RingCentral delivers cloud based phone systems designed for mobile and distributed businesses. We've posted several highlights of this interview over the past few weeks including "Should I Charge For My Product" and "Marketing Your Product Begins At Launch", but Vlad's entrepreneurial experience is extremely inspiring.
RingCentral has raised more than $44MM from investors like Sequoia, Khosla, DAG and others. Interestingly all four rounds have basically been from inside investors pumping more and more money into the growing company.
For the past 15 years Derek has been building communities. He is the co-founder/CEO of Bevy, a SaaS product that helps companies like Salesforce, Atlassian, Google, Snowflake, and Adobe build virtual and in-person communities. Bevy has raised $60M from Accel, Upfront Ventures, and others. He co-founded Startup Grind, a community of 600 Chapters in 125 countries educating, inspiring, and connecting startup people. Since 2012 Startup Grind has hosted 20,000 events. In 2010 he co-founded Commonred which was acquired by Income.com. Derek also previously worked as a product manager at Electronic Arts. He currently lives in Palo Alto CA with his wife and four children.
