From High School Drop Out to $20M in Revenue: Brad Lea’s Journey with Lightspeed VT (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You were selling this particular training to car dealerships, and that became the core business for about a year. Brad Lea: Yes, I had about 50 to 60 dealerships subscribing to use my system. I realized that that recurring revenue was definitely what I wanted to focus on. What happened was, as I

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A Startup Idea to Help Older, Laid-off Engineers

Following my three earlier pieces [Tech Layoffs For 2016 Projected To Be Deep – What Happens To 260,000 Highly Skilled Professionals In Their 40s And 50s?, Intel’s Layoffs – What Will Happen To The Older Workers?, Advice For Laid-Off Engineers], I want to brainstorm about some startup ideas that would be helpful in addressing the

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Christopher Dean, CEO of Swrve (Part 3)

Christopher Dean: People are consuming content in smaller amounts. They want action taken when they walk into Macy’s with an app open. A very interesting new development is being able to track a user, see what they’re doing in the app and understanding where they are from a location perspective, then updating a segment of a user,

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From High School Drop Out to $20M in Revenue: Brad Lea’s Journey with Lightspeed VT (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the beginning of where you started the business. I’d like to understand how you built the company step by step. You said you started the company by actually delivering your own course in the beginning. How, then, did you do that business of delivering your own course? Tell us a

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Corporate Innovation Management: Tyranny of the TAM is Less Severe

I want to call out a specific point that connects the dots between two of my prior articles, From $100k-$1M: Tyranny Of The TAM and Corporate Innovation Management: A Methodology Discussion. In my interview with Jim Euchner for the Research-Technology Management journal, I said: If you think of entrepreneurship outside of a corporation, often business ideas

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Rob Chamberlin, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of DataXoom (Part 2)

Rob Chamberlin: Everybody wants to consume content via mobile devices now and not on a PC or when they’re stationary. That trend is driving what we’re doing. We started the company saying, “Voice and SMS are just going to be apps with mobile users. The value that both consumers and businesses gain from mobility and

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Christopher Dean, CEO of Swrve (Part 2)

Christopher Dean: That gets to the next level of the platform, which is really all about automation and integration. How do we automate some of these experiences when you have millions and millions of users using your application? You need to treat them in segments. You can treat them on an individual basis but we

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From High School Drop Out to $20M in Revenue: Brad Lea’s Journey with Lightspeed VT (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the business model? How do people pay you? Is that a SaaS kind of a business model? Brad Lea: Exactly, Software-as-a-Service. Usually, we will charge a little bit to get it set up and created. Then depending on the license type that you have, it will cost either X amount per

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