If you’ve been around startups long enough, you know pivots are often just part of the process. And sometimes, before even beginning a startup, trying new things in your career can lead you to the venture worth pursuing.
This was the case for Andrew Miller, the CEO of Cary-based startup Cameyo.
Miller’s career pivots are varied: growing up in California, he enlisted in the military during the first Gulf War. Once he got out of the military, he decided he wanted to become a lawyer, and started working at the California State Assembly while in college before running political campaigns.
That was hard, grueling work, and after Miller got married, he decided to enter a new field entirely: marketing. Companies were looking for people who could tell their story, especially tech startups. But after leading marketing as the Chief Marketing Officer at software company PrinterLogic, Miller met Eyal Dotan. Dotan was a serial entrepreneur who had started development on a free product that would end up becoming Cameyo.
After talking with thousands of users, Dotan realized that there was a strong demand for a cloud-native solution to securely deliver applications to workers, users, or students on any device.
At the time of their early interactions, Dotan was in Thailand and Miller was in the United States. They would meet every Tuesday and Thursday at 11 p.m. for either Dotan or Miller in their respective time zones—they would alternate—and chat until 1 in the morning until they found they had commercialized the product, officially launching Cameyo in 2018.
In our current cloud world, Miller said, most applications are web-enabled, but organizations still rely on Windows applications that are not. Therefore, organizations can’t deploy Windows applications correctly or securely on a personal device, creating complications for workers who bring their own equipment or work from home.
“We’re essentially giving organizations the freedom to securely deliver these applications, so they can have the workforce that makes the most sense for them,” Miller said.
Miller describes what Cameyo does as meeting the customer where they are in their own journey, simply installing into a company’s current data center and working in their cloud environment. They’re able to deploy their first applications within hours instead of weeks and months.
Since launching, Cameyo has brought in around 150 customers and has no plans to slow down. It also made this year’s Triangle Tweener List. Although the team is lean at just 15 employees, Cameyo raised $1 million from California-based VC firm Stormbreaker and is looking ahead to further growth.
Taking the right risks
Miller said Cameyo, as a startup venture, presented itself as a huge risk. The founders were leaving fulltime jobs and starting out with no salary.
However, the early success Cameyo had built only accelerated when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Suddenly, nearly every company was working remotely and within days, they needed to deliver applications to their employees. Miller said Cameyo exploded both on the commercial side and in education, as school districts looked to provide seamless online learning experiences to students.
Without the ability to stay flexible, take risks and fail fast, Cameyo may not have gotten to where they are today.
“A startup has a lot of ups and downs,” Miller said. “Obviously, you’re running a business and you want to take things seriously, but any startup, you’re going to hear the word ‘no’ about a thousand times.”
Miller said they heard so often that other larger companies were doing the same thing and thus the market was oversaturated, but they stood by their convictions that no other company was delivering what Cameyo did in the same way.
“If we were to listen to that, we would have packed up and gone home,” Miller said. “But we stayed flexible. We went where the market took us to build our business. We stayed true to our values.”
In current working conditions, Miller said Cameyo enables organizations the freedom to go hybrid or fully remote securely.
As a company based in Cary, Miller said Cameyo has benefited from the collaborative tech ecosystem of the Triangle, and he’s saying this as someone who came from Silicon Valley.
“As we started thinking about, O.K., so where are we going to headquarter this company, it became very apparent that this is one of the best places in the entire country to do business,” Miller said.
From the top tech companies setting up shop here, to the growing startup activity and talent pipeline from local universities, Miller cannot say enough about the area as a place to run a business.
The team Cameyo has built here and across the world is something Miller’s been especially proud of.
“None of this can be done without them,” Miller said. “I am absolutely humbled at the hours and the work that these people who were at massive companies making a lot of money put in, that they put their faith and their trust into what we’re doing.”
As Cameyo looks into the future, Miller said they are focused on maximizing a recent partnership with Google and helping more and more organizations move to Chrome and Google Cloud. In many ways, it’s just the beginning.
