A Silicon Valley CEO has said it is incredibly easy to set up a company in the US these days thanks to tech.
Tom Gillis, 50, founded cloud computing company Bracket in 2011, his third venture.
鈥淚t used to be you had to hire an IT guy, you had to hire a HR person, you had to incorporate鈥� and figure all this stuff out,鈥� he told 老九品茶Cloud.
鈥淣ow you just plug into all that stuff as a service so the amount of capital necessary to start a company, and just start functioning, it’s almost zero 鈥� it鈥檚 just amazing.
鈥淭hat has changed the start-up landscape in that you see a lot of companies going after relatively small ideas.
鈥淭he companies that are going after big ideas still require a lot of capital.
鈥淭here are a lot of really smart people that work at large companies, but those companies get consumed with 鈥榯oday鈥�.鈥�
Years before YouTube took over the online video space, Gillis founded a start-up which sought to ease the burden of audio and video content on internet infrastructure.
He says that the tech is used widely today but was 鈥�10 years ahead of primary demand鈥�.
Gillis, who also spoke of the ‘fear of missing out’ which helps promote investment in the Valley,聽then founded IronPort, a spam filter which doubled its bookings year on year until it was acquired by Cisco for $830m.
Mountain View-based Bracket is a disrupter. Gillis and co-founder Jason Lango believed they had found an innovative approach to cloud computing and set to work developing the systems behind their vision of a 鈥榗loud workload protection platform鈥�, attracting a total of $130million in funding from top-tier VC firms.
鈥淰Cs are looking for things that completely redefine industry 鈥� and Bracket is that,鈥� he says.
鈥淲e have a new blueprint for how data centres are built that we’ve been working on for a long time.
鈥淚 think that if we’re successful, this could be one of those companies that returns the whole [VC] fund.
鈥淲e don’t have a direct competitor so our biggest challenge is really execution; building all this software is very complicated.
鈥淲e’ve been working on it for years and continue to iterate rapidly, work closely with customers to make all this vision turn into reality.鈥�
A common theme running through many successful tech companies 鈥� in the States, Europe and worldwide 鈥� is a people-focused approach.
Demand for developers and skilled digital workers is increasing rapidly as technology becomes embedded into all businesses and the pure tech sector expands.
The talent pool is unable to keep pace.
鈥淪ince tech moves so fast, it’s not the IP that defines great companies. It is great people that make great products, and great products make great companies,鈥� says Gillis.
鈥淲e put a huge amount of time and energy in how to attract, retain, and motivate the best talent, and we’re very effective at that.
鈥淎lthough it is very time consuming, it’s an investment we think is important because at the end of the day it’s the people that power this business.
鈥淭he original founding notion was I wanted to create a place where people loved their jobs and were proud of the work they do and felt like they could move mountains, always and forever.鈥�