Bootstrapping with Services in India: Srishtisoft CEO Ajay Sharma (Part 2)

Sramana: What were the primary sectors that you supported? Ajay Sharma: We did a lot of application integration work for healthcare companies, media companies, and financial companies. Those were our three primary verticals. In 2004, we ran into some challenges. In fact, the period between 2004 and 2005 was challenging for most Indian services companies. At

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Mike Pellerin, Director, Enterasys University (Extreme Networks) (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What you are doing is that you are selling equipment to the universities. And you have a lot of curriculum material, which you have packaged up into MOOC and then, you are letting students use it. In case, they express some interest in using those digital curriculum materials, colleges and universities might want

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Thursday, Jan. 16 – 201st 1M/1M Mentoring Roundtable For Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 201st FREE online 1M/1M roundtable mentoring session on Thursday, January 16, 2014, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/9:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea to Sramana Mitra. You’ll gain straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and she’ll answer any

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Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about what happened with that money? What were the Series B milestones? What were you able to accomplish? How did the product come together? Jonathan Ellis: When we were pitching Series B, we had the blueprint of what we wanted to build for DataStax Enterprise. We knew that we wanted

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Bootstrapping with Services in India: Srishtisoft CEO Ajay Sharma (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Bootstrapping with service, then building two products, then splitting up the company into two, and finally, scaling a sizable product company – not the kind of stories we hear often from Indian entrepreneurs. This story is a rare window into the journey of a group of

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Mike Pellerin, Director, Enterasys University (Extreme Networks) (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So what you are talking about is the student curriculum development including knowledge, talking about localization. Is it a strategy of Extreme Networks? It sounded like you have a lot of budgets to work with. Why is Extreme Network trying to nail the common educational publisher?

Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about the business model from that time? What were you charging? What were the deal sizes and so forth? Jonathan Ellis: When we were first starting the company, we had a potential $80,000 deal. I told Matt, “You know if we can get a few deals like this, we might

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Building a Retail Business in India: Manish Sharma, CEO of Printo (Part 7)

Sramana: What was your next step? Was your first store a proof of concept to raise more money? Manish Sharma: I had enough money to do something else, but not enough for an entirely new shop. I decided to put up a smaller shop inside a larger store. I clearly identified the demand and need

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