Catching Up On Readings: VivaTech TC Hackathon 2019

This feature from TechCrunch covers the winner and runners-up of the Hackathon held at VivaTech in Paris last month. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

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Bootstrapping From a Small Town in Denmark to $12 Million: Sebastian Petersen, CEO of TrendHim (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’ll tell you one thing though. You made this comment that outsourcing is bullshit. That’s absolutely false. There are a lot of ways of succeeding. You have succeeded in one way. There are a lot of other people who have succeeded in other ways. We have case studies of virtual companies with 140

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Taking a Capital Efficient Company Public and Beyond: Medidata CEO Tarek Sherif (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I remember we talked about it a little bit the last time we spoke. So Veeva has its eyes obviously on the clinical data management space. They have one big customer this year. I think that’s their first big pharmaceutical customer. Can you analyze that deal for us? Tarek Sherif: I can’t analyze

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Bootstrapping From a Small Town in Denmark to $12 Million: Sebastian Petersen, CEO of TrendHim (Part 4)

Sebastian Petersen: If you want to start an ecommerce company today, it’s very difficult to do it without a lot of funding and thinking big from the very beginning. Today, buying visitors and customers is four times the price it was 10 years ago. You have to think more creatively today. Sramana Mitra: I’d say

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Taking a Capital Efficient Company Public and Beyond: Medidata CEO Tarek Sherif (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In 2009 when you went public, what was the market share situation vis a vis you versus FaceForward? Tarek Sherif: They had a larger market share when we went public. They were larger, certainly, in terms of revenue and market share, but we were growing much faster. Sramana Mitra: Were they public? Tarek

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Best of Bootstrapping: How SmartBuyGlasses CEO David Menning Bootstrapped to $50 Million

David has bootstrapped a global e-commerce venture from Hong Kong. Splendid execution! 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? David Menning: I grew up in Sydney. I’ve been educated in Australia. In my later years, I studied

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Bootstrapping From a Small Town in Denmark to $12 Million: Sebastian Petersen, CEO of TrendHim (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What country did you first go into outside Denmark? Sebastian Petersen: Norway and Sweden. Then we started going south into Germany and France. Sramana Mitra: Was there something different that Norway and Sweden wanted? Sebastian Petersen: Only simple things. Once we started moving out of Scandinavia to Germany and France and especially Eastern

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Taking a Capital Efficient Company Public and Beyond: Medidata CEO Tarek Sherif (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What other strategic moves did you make between the $10 million round and the IPO where you grew revenues tremendously? Was there anything you did strategically? Tarek Sherif: Yes, I think there are a couple of things. Let me take you back one step. So, we had two mantras when we were building

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