Building a Capital Marketplace for Mid-Market Businesses: Axial CEO Peter Lehrman (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Was that $1 million in the beginning the only capital infusion or have you had other capital infusions? Peter Lehrman: Since then, we’ve raised another $20 million. Sramana Mitra: Walk me through the chronology of those rounds of financing. Peter Lehrman: The subsequent $20 million has been raised across three financing rounds. The

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Wrike CEO Andrew Filev (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Based on our conversation so far, I picked up two key philosophies on how you build your company. One is this extensive A/B testing to optimize your customer acquisition. The second is evolving the product continuously through customer input and iteration. Andrew Filev: It’s true but I would phrase it a little differently.

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287th Roundtable For Entrepreneurs Starting In 30 Minutes: Live Tweeting By @1Mby1M

Today’s 287th FREE online 1M/1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, December 17, at 8:00 a.m. PST/11:00 a.m. EST/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are welcome!

From Unicorn to Unicorpse: Etsy Falters on Amazon’s Entry

Etsy (Nasdaq: ETSY) went public earlier this year, a much awaited IPO at an $1.8 billion valuation. But since listing, serious issues with the company have resulted in a tumbling valuation under public market scrutiny. At its current stock price, Etsy is still appearing above the billion dollar mark, but barely so. And its trajectory

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Innovating in Fintech: Jason Hogg, CEO of Lending.com (Part 1)

FinTech is hot these days. Jason has particular expertise in the segment, and he discusses his multiple ventures. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the beginning of your personal story. Where were your born, raised, and in what kind of background? Jason Hogg: I’m from New York originally and grew up just outside the city. My

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Building a Capital Marketplace for Mid-Market Businesses: Axial CEO Peter Lehrman (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How do you acquire members for your community? What is the marketing strategy? How do people find out about you? Peter Lehrman: We have a couple of different strategies for the different markets that we’re pursuing. We pursue sources of capital and the investment banking and business brokerage community. Beginning in 2014, we

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How Did Mark Zuckerberg Retain 26% Of Equity In Facebook After Raising So Much Money?

In general, my observation is that entrepreneurs retain a much higher percentage of equity if they can bootstrap their way to showing real traction, and then keep delivering solid performance metrics. Obviously, Facebook was in high gear when Peter Thiel invested the first outside money into the company, so seed financing was not some $25k

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Wrike CEO Andrew Filev (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to a bit more of a chronological story. I understand the philosophy of how you built the company. It’s very interesting what you can do today in terms of really doing these kinds of testing on all marketing exercises at a very dramatic level. Today’s world allows you to do

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