Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Wrike CEO Andrew Filev (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the first year that you were actually selling this product? Was it 2007? Andrew Filev: Yes. If I remember correctly, we launched the product in June 2007. We had a 30-day trial. The first payment came in 30 days later. Sramana Mitra: At the end of 2007, how many customers did you have? What

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Catching Up On Readings: Disrupt London 2015

This feature from TechCrunch features the results of the Startup battlefield held at the Disrupt London event held on December 8, 2015. The winner is artificial intelligence music composition technology Jukedeck while the other three finalists included freelancer managing platform Lystable, last-mile delivery service for urban Africa MAX, and product marketing monitoring service for retail stores Yoobic. For this

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Peruvian Entrepreneur, Bootstrapping to $200 Million: Belisario Rosas, CEO of WEI (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let me actually probe each of those points a bit. Did you, at this point, become an e-commerce site? Were people ordering online? Belisario Rosas: No. We barely, to this date, do any type of e-commerce. All of it is solution-based and face-to-face selling. Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about solution service infrastructure

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Building a Capital Marketplace for Mid-Market Businesses: Axial CEO Peter Lehrman (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much are we talking? What kind of capital base did you start with? Peter Lehrman: About a million. Sramana Mitra: How did you bring this two-sided marketplace together? There’s always a chicken and egg in marketplaces. What was your strategy to bridge that? Peter Lehrman: We built two products and launched them

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Wrike CEO Andrew Filev (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What state was Wrike at when you came to Silicon Valley? Did you have something? Did you have an MVP that you started to work on? Andrew Filev: It was a very early prototype. I think we launched a beta version at a conference in Paris. Then right after that, I moved to the

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INDEX: Funding High Impact New Ventures

By Guest Author Soren Petersen High-impact Design Driven Startups are investors’ darlings and the INDEX: Award is taking advantage of this by applying their unique design award evaluation process to vetting candidates for venture capital funding. The organization’s newly launched Danish Ventures – Investing in Design to Improve Life foundation is the next step in

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Peruvian Entrepreneur, Bootstrapping to $200 Million: Belisario Rosas, CEO of WEI (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You were doing, more or less, the same thing that the company you were working for was doing? Belisario Rosas: Yes, very much. We just continued accepting clients that we were dealing with or looking for new clients. Sramana Mitra: How did that ramp? Belisario Rosas: Like I said earlier, we started with

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Building a Capital Marketplace for Mid-Market Businesses: Axial CEO Peter Lehrman (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In the event that you’re using equity as a financial instrument, is the expectation exit or do you also do dividend style financing? Peter Lehrman: We don’t do any of it. We’re the platform that connects the entrepreneurs with the investors. Those decisions are determined by the investors in partnership with the entrepreneurs

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