228th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Gus Tai, Trinity Ventures

Gus Tai, General Partner at Trinity Ventures, discusses their investment thesis around e-commerce over the years – from BlueNile in 1999, to Zulily, Dot and Bo, and Callisto Media more recently, and what he anticipates for the future.

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From Iran to Stanford to Silicon Valley Entrepreneur: Farnaz Ronaghi, Co-Founder and CTO of NovoEd (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Your hypothesis was that you’re going to be selling to the corporate learning environment, did that pan out? Farnaz Ronaghi: It’s too early to say if it has panned out completely, but it has. The mix of our customers in the past two years has mainly been universities. Then there are lots of

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Surviving Near-Death Experiences and Going Public in London: Michael Hughes, co-CEO of LoopUp (Part 1)

An entrepreneur’s journey is often about survival and getting to profitability so that near-death situations do not threaten his venture’s existence. Michael talks about his team’s long, often treacherous, path through troubled waters. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and

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Do Women Entrepreneurs Build Unicorns?

There is a myth in the startup eco-system that women entrepreneurs do not build billion dollar companies. This is a MYTH. Watch this inspiring 1 minute 33 second video of how Therese Tucker did build one:

From Iran to Stanford to Silicon Valley Entrepreneur: Farnaz Ronaghi, Co-Founder and CTO of NovoEd (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The pivot story is very interesting. I actually think this is a very helpful discussion because the online education space is still struggling to find business models that work. Coursera and Udacity have had a lot of problems finding scalable business models. Could you work me through the other experiments you did and

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Catching Up On Readings: Q217 IPO Pipeline

This feature from Nasdaq tracks the buzzing activity in the IPO calendar. Last week saw seven more companies including Cloudera and Okta joining the IPO Pipeline. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

From Iran to Stanford to Silicon Valley Entrepreneur: Farnaz Ronaghi, Co-Founder and CTO of NovoEd (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was your hypothesis at this point about what was going to be the business model of your company? Did you have one? Farnaz Ronaghi: Yes. In the beginning, there were a lot of companies who started doing MOOCs but in different flavors. There’s Coursera who seemed like it was trying to replace

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From Iran to Stanford to Silicon Valley Entrepreneur: Farnaz Ronaghi, Co-Founder and CTO of NovoEd (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you start this? When did you start offering the course around which you did the first experiment? Farnaz Ronaghi: Mid-2012. Sramana Mitra: You said you had 30,000 people who came together. Farnaz Ronaghi: In the first Technology Entrepreneurship class, we had 40,000 enrolments. Sramana Mitra: What time window are we

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