Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Bellacor. What do you do? What kind of customers do you serve? Brenda Boehler: I’m the CEO of Bellacor and Bellacor Pro. We are the experts in an online space that has a passionate following in the lighting and home furnishing space.
Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to build a product that you could service the pharmaceutical industry with? Roger Hale: The business was formed in 2001, but we started in 2002. We immediately started working on the product. We had some prototypes available within the year. We , in fact, sold our first
Sramana Mitra: What did this $21 million, which you raised, enable you to do that you couldn’t have done organically? John Pope: Not all of it was direct. We had some secondary in there. Out of respect to the guy who moved on, I won’t say exactly how much. The funding that we used as
Sramana Mitra: What year did you start Linguamatics? Roger Hale: In 2001, right after the dot-com bubble. I had always been interested in starting a company. I don’t really like working for other people. The key moment in starting Linguamatics was SRI deciding to wind down and shut down its Cambridge lab. We felt that
Entrepreneurs are invited to the 363rd FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, August 10, 2017, 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. You’ll receive straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and answers to any of your questions. Others can register
Sramana Mitra: Great. How far does this bring us to? You mentioned that you went up to $25 million with no outside financing. Would these two major strategic approaches cover that 0 to $25 million journey? John Pope: That gets us to $25 million. We’ve always had a broad appeal. Our product works for 99%
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Cambridge, England is a great place for high-end technical talent. This story traces the journey of a group of such talented people with core expertise in Natural Language Processing, and how they turned their expertise into a robust, profitable business. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the
Finding an idea to start a new venture is always tricky. Watch this inspiring 2-minute video and learn an age-old methodology of identifying an opportunity: