Sramana Mitra: What year did you start selling products as opposed to just services? Chris Taylor: We started that shift in 2010. The journey was a much longer one that I expected. We were running at our typical parent consulting margins of 20% to 40% depending on the project and the year. We decided that year
Sramana Mitra: Who were the target audience for this product? David Stubenvoll: We wanted the interest and attention of consumers in order to sell advertising to various financial players. One of our biggest advertisers were mutual fund companies and brokers. Sramana Mitra: How did it ramp? How did you get the consumer base to attract
Sramana Mitra: After you moved to the Bay Area, what were the next major strategic moves? Philippe d’Offay: After moving to the Bay Area, we had a product that physicians were very happy with. We were cash flow positive for four straight years. I talked about almost being bankrupt when we were in Atlanta. The
Sramana Mitra: What year was this when you were the only employee? Chris Taylor: 2006. That’s how it started. For the first couple of years, I did a lot of different projects around the auto industry and also for a lot of startups out in the West Coast. Sramana Mitra: You were consulting at that
Entrepreneurs are invited to the 317th FREE online 1M/1M roundtable mentoring session on Thursday, August 18, 2016, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 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
In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:
Sramana Mitra: What did Gulp do? David Stubenvoll: We were your very typical startup in that we wandered a little bit. We started out providing mutual fund information on the Internet. It blossomed into creating websites for mutual funds. We actually created a trading platform, and became one of the larger personal finance sites on
Apple holds over $180 billion in offshore cash that it has hardly paid any taxes on. If they brought it back to the US, they would owe over $50 billion in taxes. Google has over $40 billion stashed away. Big numbers. Unfair practices. What’s to be done? I have a proposal. Both Apple and Google