Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like it’s a two-sided managed marketplace. What’s the business model? How much are you paying the counselors? How does this work out?

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695th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Vinit Bhansali, Takshil Venture Partners

Vinit Bhansali, Founder and General Partner at Takshil Venture Partners, discusses how his firm is investing in India.

Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: That’s interesting because you had already validated that there was a market for what you were offering. One of the things that I don’t like about demo days at all is that a company just goes into an accelerator with no validation, and within three months has to go in front of investors

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Best of Bootstrapping: Solopreneur Bootstrapped to Over $5M

Ukrainian entrepreneur Vladimir Gendelman started as a solo entrepreneur in Detroit and, when we spoke in 2023, he had bootstrapped a $5M+ niche e-commerce company called Company Folders. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background? Vladimir Gendelman:

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Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: And what did you end up doing to address that itch? Hanmei Wu: Well, it wasn’t very planned out, to be honest. I was still quite young, only a few years out of college. I was just kind of doing it on my own at first, maybe just charging an hourly amount. I

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Start With Customers Not Investors

For our Seed Capital series of podcasts, I’ve interviewed hundreds of investors, especially micro-VCs and angels who play an important role in the early-stage game. The toughest round of funding an entrepreneur will seek to raise is Pre-seed. How do you increase your odds? Pre-seed has the lowest probability of success. Over 99% of the

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Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu (Part 1)

EdTech is notoriously difficult to build at venture scale. Hanmei is doing it.

July 31 – 696th 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable for Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 696th FREE online 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable on Thursday, July 31, 2025, at 8 a.m. PDT / 11 a.m. EDT / 5 p.m. CEST / 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,

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