Catching Up On Readings: Disrupt SF Hackathon

This feature from the TechCrunch covers the highlights of the Disrupt San Francisco Hackathon held over this weekend. The winner of the grand prize is Alexa Shop Assist while ASLink and SpeechCoach.ai are the runners up. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

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Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Where was that factory? JT Marino: That was in Southern California. They were willing to take a chance. Their primary business wasn’t even mattresses. We had to go to a factory that didn’t produce mattresses and convince them to produce them. As far as the marketing side goes, we were using family, friends,

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Daniel Saks, Co-CEO of AppDirect (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You have a lot of customers switching from Zoho to your platform? Daniel Saks: We would work with Zoho as well. We have many brands in our ecosystem that include those entry-level providers. We think all SaaS brands are great but what we do see is as the complexity of what you need

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Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 2)

JT Marino: We shut the site down and quit our jobs. We officially launched Tuft & Needle in October of 2012. The primary differentiation for us was that we were direct to consumer. We had just one model. This was very contrarian to the entire industry. There’s no company that makes one model. There’s firm,

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6 Podcast Interviews with Seed Investors

There are shifts happening in the world of seed investing. Some questions are emerging: How do you process the current investment climate where capital is moving further and further upstream? How does an angel investor (or an entrepreneur, for that matter) mitigate the Series A gap? How do you parse Unicorn mania? As an angel

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Daniel Saks, Co-CEO of AppDirect (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What are the trends in your space that what you are doing highlights? It sounds like you are doing this for small to medium businesses. What trends are you seeing? Daniel Saks: There are three main trends or drivers. The first is that the number of applications available for small businesses have grown

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367th 1Mby1M Recording On September 14, 2017: With Rob Purdy, Power2Motivate

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 1)

Online mattress is the hottest e-commerce category these days, and here is yet another one delivering venture scale growth without venture capital. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? JT Marino: I was born in Phoenix,

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