From Friends and Family Funding to $30 Million Exit: Vertical Response Founder Janine Popick (Part 1)

While we’re spending a great deal of time analyzing billion dollar Unicorn companies, it is important not to lose sight of the capital-efficient, bootstrapped or minimally capitalized companies that have achieved success, provided significant return on investment to their stakeholders, and built value for their customers. Read Janine Popick’s wonderful story! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start

Read Full Article »

Featured Videos

Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of ramp did you see based on that? Kiyan Foroughi: I think the most interesting stats I can give you are actually how well we did in the Christmas of 2014 versus Christmas of 2013. We increased our conversion rates by 90%. It was beyond my wildest dreams to increase it

Read Full Article »

244th Roundtable For Entrepreneurs Starting NOW, Live Tweeting By @1Mby1M

Today’s 244th FREE online 1M/1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, January 15, at 8:00 a.m. PST/11:00 a.m. EST/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join.

Valuation Without Revenue Unicorns

Excerpt from my new Entrepreneur Journeys book, Billion Dollar Unicorns: Recently, Unicorns with multi-billion dollar valuations without the revenue to justify them have returned with a vengeance. The frenzy started with Facebook acquiring Instagram for $1 Billion, and climaxed with the same company acquiring WhatsApp for $19 billion. If there were any analysts that had

Read Full Article »

Achieving Product-Market Fit That Allows You to Build Billion Dollar Unicorns: Gaurav Dhillon, Founder of Informatica and SnapLogic (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Help me rationalize what’s happening right now in the market regarding late-stage valuation bubbles. We have two kinds of bubbles in the startup venture world. One is in the seed capital. In 2013, 70,000 companies were angel-financed. That’s too much actually. It’s great that they got angel-funded, but then if you look at

Read Full Article »

Achieving Product-Market Fit That Allows You to Build Billion Dollar Unicorns: Gaurav Dhillon, Founder of Informatica and SnapLogic (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: This time around, are there any surprises in the product market fit process? You repeated the same process, I imagine. Gaurav Dhillon: The same thing but with a twist. With Informatica, the timing was spot on. The change was happening in a big way. Year 2000 was coming. From the time we raised venture

Read Full Article »

Future Unicorns

Excerpt from my new Entrepreneur Journeys book, Billion Dollar Unicorns:   As I think about where future unicorns are likely to be, what trends present the characteristics of opportunities that can scale to that extent, I have a few observations. I have had the opportunity to discuss these observations with a number of thoughtful industry leaders,

Read Full Article »

Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What were good sources of emails for you? Kiyan Foroughi: Our on-site campaigns are usually the most successful ones. But we had fine-tuned a way with Facebook ads to really get some good subscribers that would activate into good customers. The other thing was partnerships. Sramana Mitra: You were doing Facebook advertising. Is

Read Full Article »