Sramana Mitra: You knew the specs of what needed to be built. That kind of domain knowledge is invaluable. David Chmielewski: Right. We knew what we wanted to build. We already built it. Our flagship product is a dispute system. At BoA, I had already built three of them. We didn’t have a single line
Over the years, we have developed a proven methodology for building tech startups. We have started packaging the 1Mby1M methodology into short courses on Udemy. This is an extension of our strategy to democratize entrepreneurship education at scale, globally. Here are the $12.99 coupon codes for all of our courses on Udemy. These coupons expire
Sramana Mitra: Wearables is a very interesting industry that is going to be entirely design-driven. What about on the IT side whether it’s a healthcare IT or software-driven solution? What have you invested in that is interesting? Dheeraj Pandey: We’ve done a late-stage investment in a healthcare analytics company. They’re trying to surround Epic, which
David Chmielewski: We established Quavo as a virtual company. We used most of the methodology that we learned at BoA. How do you run a remote company? We all decided to leave our positions and start the company. We knew our platform like what we wanted to build on. We had a general idea of
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. We’re big fans of bootstrapping to exit case studies. Imagine Easy Solutions’ Co-founder and Co-CEO Neal Taparia shares his wonderful journey. They scaled the business to over $20 million in revenue without investment and sold to Chegg in 2016. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very
Sramana Mitra: Our focus is on the early stage. Let’s double-click down on your early-stage work. How do you define early-stage? Dheeraj Pandey: I don’t believe in spray-and-pray. I get to know someone over five to seven meetings and sometimes tenacity helps as well. They must succeed if they’re tenacious. In the world of sales,
Sramana Mitra: Why were you looking for remote work? David Chmielewski: I had found my wife at Auto Owners, got married, and didn’t want to leave. I grew up in Michigan. I still live there. I wanted to have the ability to spread my wings a little bit, but I knew it wasn’t necessarily going
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Michelle Munson is Co-founder of Aspera, a company she began after being laid off. Aspera was her realization that she could not only control her own career path, but also create jobs for other people in a culture she established. I hope this conversation from 2009