Best of Bootstrapping: Blitzscaling Strategy vs. Bootstrapping

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  You must have read something or the other about Blitzscaling, the hypergrowth phenomenon that Reid Hoffman has been championing: What entrepreneur or founder doesn’t aspire to build the next Amazon, Facebook, or Airbnb? Yet those who actually manage to do so are exceedingly rare. So

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Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There’s another positive impact that happened during the pandemic. On the sales side, organizations became comfortable buying products over Zoom calls. You do everything on Zoom. Large deals were closing purely on Zoom calls. Arvind Jain: Yes. In our first year, we had one sales person. Then we hired the second one. We

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Catching Up On Readings: Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2024

This report from Gartner identifies the top 10 strategic technology trends that organizations need to explore in 2024. These include democratized Generative AI, AI trust, risk and security management, and AI-Augmented Development among others. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This strategy that you followed is good for companies that have a lot of early-stage funding. It’s not so easy to follow for companies that are trying to work in a very constrained financial resources situation. What did you learn? Focus on the nuggets of what you learned from the early customer engagements

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Roundtable Recap: October 19 – Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later

During this week’s roundtable, we worked with two entrepreneurs. RAVC Solutions First up we had Ratan Agrahari in Lucknow, India, pitch RAVC Solutions, a solar services venture with serious ambition. Aladdin Digital Next we had Darlington Onyeagoro from Lagos, Nigeria, pitch Aladdin Digital, a cross border payment company for the African market. You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In your selection of which investors to work with, what was your decision making? Was it people you worked with before? Arvind Jain: There are two key investors in our first round. One of them was Ravi from Lightspeed. I had worked with him in my previous startup. It was an easy choice

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Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: This problem has been identified a long time ago. People have tried to build such enterprise knowledge management companies before. I’ve seen many of these attempts. Mostly they’ve failed. While these attempts were made and failing, there was an explosion of digital tools and data. All this was happening in parallel. In 2019,

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Best of Bootstrapping: The Buy Side Perspective of Bootstrap to Exit Startups

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  I hope you are following the Bootstrapping to Exit (let’s call it B2E) articles. Last time, I showed you some case studies of larger companies who are acquiring bootstrapped startups. In this post, I will double-click down on the buy-side psychology of the B2E phenomenon. There

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