Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace, has done a prior successful, bootstrapped venture from St. Louis and exited it. This time round, she has bootstrapped to about $350k in revenue and then raised venture capital from Highland Capital and others. Stephanie is a damn compelling entrepreneur.
Jana Francis, Founder and President of Steals.com, has experienced significant challenges in building her bootstrapped company from Utah. She candidly discussed these challenges, and her experiences are eye-opening and inspiring.
Betsy Corcoran, Founder and CEO of EdSurge, is an authority on the subject of educational technology.
J.T. O’Donnell, a top 20 LinkedIn Influencer, and CEO of Work It Daily (formerly Careerealism and CareerHMO), shares what she is seeing from the career coaching perspective. Our observations about this gigantic trend of people starting companies while holding onto their full-time jobs, is from the entrepreneurship perspective. J.T. is in the middle of the decision-making process as people are trying to decide how to play their careers and when to become entrepreneurs.
Janet Kosloff, Co-Founder and CEO at InCrowd, has bootstrapped her company, then raised about $2.5 million in funding and hit $10 million in revenue in 2016. She shares insights from her journey.
Heidi Jannenga, Co-founder and President at WebPT, yet another scrappy entrepreneur who managed to bootstrap to over $1M ARR and THEN raised the first million in angel funding.
Sramana Mitra: What trends are you picking up from your customer base? Sash Sunkara: There’s some immediate problems that enterprises are trying to solve. One of the biggest issues is security. I think the clouds have addressed that. They have the newest technologies. These are new data centers with the latest in encryption management. With
Sash Sunkara, Founder and CEO at RackWare, is a rare example of a female startup CEO who has built a sizable venture funded technology company in hardcore tech. She shared her journey and the discussion was enlightening.