Last year, 43 percent of employed Americans said they spent at least some time working remotely. While it’s a nice perk to have, it may take a toll on productivity, depending on your virtual office set up. You may not be able to login to your internal profile or access essential files for a project.
With over twenty years in the software industry under his belt, Kevin Goodman has seen the struggles behind reducing hardware in offices and the cost of transferring data onto the cloud. He set out to develop a platform where enterprises can reduce operating costs and help increase employee productivity while working remotely.
FSLogix helps enterprises swiftly move their data, whether for 900 or 50,000 users, and provides an enhanced virtual workspace solution for employees. The cloud-based platform powers Office 365 and applications, and makes user profiles natively and virtually accessible.
The company presented at Venture Atlanta back in October, and earlier this year secured a $1 million credit facility from Silicon Valley Bank to support future growth. FSLogix is headquartered in Atlanta with offices in Salt Lake City, Denver, Boston, and Europe.
Here, Goodman shares more about how he and his co-founder jumped into this venture, how FSLogix keeps your data safe, and leadership lessons he’s learned along the way.
What’s your pitch?
We enable enterprises to migrate from their physical or private desktops to any cloud faster and cheaper than anybody else can do it. Between me and my co-founders, we’ve been in the Windows desktop space since there was a Windows. We’re well aware of all the problems that you have and we finally put a company together than can fix them.
What problem are you solving?
The problem that you have today is cooperation. Enterprises run on Microsoft Windows and it is a problem getting their applications and their data to various devices. It’s too often too expensive to transfer and handle that data. Here at FSLogix, we’ve found that there’s a simpler way of doing that. Our products remove barriers to adoption of cloud desktops, which are cheaper and you can access them from anywhere.
Who is your target audience?
Large-scale enterprises. What you’re finding as the industry matures here, there’s a middle ground called system integrators who are collecting up and will be our customers, but they may have thousands of smaller SMB customers. A system integrator then may have 50,000 seats, but that may be made up of 500 companies.
What are key features of your platform that benefit these enterprises?
The FS in FSLogix stands for File Systems. One of the key features and one of the problems we’ve had with Windows applications before is when you tried to roam them, the applications like to think that their data is local. FSLogix makes applications think their data is local, regardless if whether the application is on our desktop, laptop, up in a private data center, or up in the public cloud.
We do that with the same speed as if it was local, because then you can secure your data up either in the cloud or in a private data center. For example, imagine the terrible situation where you left your laptop on a bus or the train, it would now have no data at risk.
There are a variety of reasons why people want to do this — what’s stopped them in the past is the applications don’t behave correctly when they’re ripped apart like that. They weren’t meant to. And FSLogix is that glue that makes it all look seamless.
What’s your current funding status?
We’re funded through Series A. Mosley Ventures and Alerion Ventures are the two VC firms in that round. We were also at Venture Atlanta looking to do our B round.
How do you hope to leverage that next round?
We will use this next round of funding to expand sales marketing. We always want to update our engineering staff, but right now, the key to our growth is just making these companies out there aware that we have a solution to their problem that they’ve been desperately seeking. We’ll just use some new sales and marketing to connect the two together.
You’ve been in the entrepreneurial arena for a while. What leadership lessons have you learned along the way?
Recognize as soon as you can whether the business you’re building is a lifestyle business, or whether it’s a business that will support outside investors. There’s nothing wrong with lifestyle businesses. Many companies in this world are built up like that. But if you have a business that’ll support outside investors, then you know to take the proper steps to go out and get yourself some venture capital or private equity. Recognize that you’re in the business to have a success exit rather than exit to be acquired or go public.
