The Startup Velocity Question: What Hinders Acceleration in VC Funded Companies?

I have been running 1Mby1M since 2010. I find myself saying to entrepreneurs ad nauseam that VCs want to invest in startups that can go from zero to $100 million in revenue in 5 to 7 years.

Startups that do not have what it takes to achieve velocity should not be venture funded.

Experienced VCs, over time, have developed heuristics to gauge what constitutes a high growth venture investment thesis. 

1Mby1M Udemy Courses with Sramana Mitra: Bootstrapping

Over the course of two years, we have released over 70 courses on Udemy with the aim to democratize entrepreneurship education at scale globally. This series of posts aims to help you find the one you need easily and provide you with discount coupons.

Concur CEO Steve Singh (Part 1)

Concur CEO Steve Singh recently did an interview with me to discuss the development of Concur Technologies (CNQR). Concur helps corporations lower travel and expense processing costs by streamlining the expense reporting process. It is one of the companies I have covered as part of my Enterprise 3.0 series.

SM: I would like to trace the story of how you built the company. What I would like to start with is your personal background. Where do you come from, where did you grow up and what was your early career? SS: I am happy to cover that, although it will probably be boring! I was a product of India, but I grew up in Michigan. I spent the early part of my professional career in Silicon Valley working for a division of Apple. I also went off and started a company that became a part of Contact Software which is the maker of ACT. I did a brief stint at Oracle, followed by a stint at Symantec. Most of these changes were due to being acquired. After Symantec I came on board as the CEO of Concur, which was February 1996. >>>

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Building the Electronic Arts of Casual Gaming: PlayFirst CEO John Welch (Part 1)

The Internet is changing the content business dramatically, and in this story, we will explore the casual gaming industry through the eyes of entrepreneur John Welch, a gaming industry veteran, who hopes to build a brand as high-impact as Electronic Arts in video gaming, through his venture PlayFirst. I met John a long time ago through the MIT alumni association, and his venture capitalist for PlayFirst is also a common friend of ours, Gus Tai, of Trinity Ventures, also an MIT alum. I promise though, that this will not be a MIT lovefest.

SM: Please describe your personal background.

JW: I grew up in suburban Western Massachusetts, which offered a lot of space as compared to the Bay Area. I was either running around outside or playing with Legos or video games. I loved to swim and ski on both water and snow. We lived in the halo of two world-class cities, Boston and New York. We never went to NYC when I was a kid, but loving the Red Sox and hating the Yankees was a way of life. The Red Sox 2004 World Series victory and the three Patriots Super Bowls were incredible for Massachusetts; we waited a long time to win at a sport we didn’t invent! (Basketball was invented a few miles from where I was born in Springfield, MA.) >>>

Jim Satloff & Neal Goldman’s AI Engine, Inform (Part 1)

It turns out that both Jim Satloff and I happen to be Artificial Intelligence aficionados. What you read here is a discussion on Inform’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) based technology that attempts to create an interesting value proposition for publishers on the web. AI has been a notoriously difficult technology genre with big promises and relatively smaller actualization, except for the Search Engines. Let’s see if what Inform has to offer makes sense. >>>

Taking on Business Intelligence: Lucidera CEO Ken Rudin (Part 1)

We have had lots of discussions about Enterprise 3.0. In this interview, I will be speaking with Ken Rudin, CEO of Lucidera, a young company attempting to become a leader in the massive Business Intelligence market by applying Enterprise 3.0 principles. Readers, note that Ken is an experienced serial entrepreneur, and you will learn much by paying attention to how Ken tells his story.

SM: Please describe your personal background : Family, upbringing, early career, etc. leading up to LucidEra.
KR: I was born and raised in New York as the youngest of three siblings. Whereas everyone today talks about the prevalence of “dysfunctional families” in our country, I think I must have been blessed by being part of one of the few “functional families” in America. >>>

Re-engineering the Book Business: Blurb CEO, Eileen Gittins (Part 1)

I have written a few pieces on how the book publishing business needs to / is going to change because of the web. [Book Publishing Moves West? . Will the Digital Era Change Writing? . eBooks Future]. In this interview, I speak with Eileen Gittins, CEO of Blurb, who is attempting to democratize self-publishing by making it economic and convenient, bypassing retailers, publishers, and agents.

SM: Please describe your personal background : Family, upbringing, early career, etc. leading up to Blurb. EG: I am a child of immigrants; my mother’s family moved to New York City from Ireland and my father came to the US from England after World War II. My parents met in NYC, had four children, and moved the whole lot of us out to California when I was in second grade. Education, competitive sports (I was a competitive swimmer), and a strong work ethic were the hallmarks of my childhood. My mother was an avid reader and my father an avid photographer, so I guess I come by my interest in both honestly.
>>>

Happily Bootstrapping: Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

[Also check out my Entrepreneur Journeys book, Seed India – How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap in India]

Sridhar Vembu is the CEO of AdventNet, which owns Zoho, a new on-demand office suite we’ve been hearing about a lot lately. I spoke with Sridhar about his rather unorthodox but quite successful entrepreneurial journey.

SM: I would like to start this interview by tracing your background. SV: I was born in India, I went to Madras IIT for my undergraduate and came to Princeton to do my PhD in 1989. In 1994 I joined Qualcomm in San Diego. My PhD is in electrical engineering, so I really do not have a software background. I worked on wireless communication which was my area of interest at the time. I worked with Qualcomm for two years. I worked on CDMA, power control and some very detailed issues on wireless communications. That is how I got started in the tech industry.

My brother, who was also there at Qualcomm as a software engineer, wanted to return home to India. Software is a great business to start in India, so he moved back to India and I moved to Silicon Valley to drum up interest in our fledgling venture, which later became AdventNet. >>>

Job Search Engine Indeed CEO Paul Forster (Part 1)

We have been reviewing the Online Jobs vertical at length, and in this interview, will be speaking with Paul Forster, co-Founder and CEO of vertical search engine Indeed.

SM: Please describe your personal background. PF: My professional background is in finance. I was an investment manager with the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank, and wanted to start a business around the time I was very involved in recruiting finance professionals.

Using the internet for recruitment made a lot of sense and some successful job boards were already emerging, but there wasn’t a good finance-dedicated job board. So, in 1998, I founded Jobsinthemoney together with Rony Kahan who I had known since we did MBAs together at INSEAD business school in 1994. We grew this business to profitability before it was acquired in late 2003. Rony and I subsequently founded Indeed in 2004. >>>

Web 3.0 & Group Travel: Groople CEO Mike Stacy (Part 1)

We have talked a lot about Web 3.0 and Context. Today, we begin an interview series with Mike Stacy, CEO of an Online Travel company called Groople, which has zeroed in on the context of Group Travel. It’s a very interesting niche, and we will explore Mike’s story of building Groople.

SM: Please describe your personal background : Family, upbringing, early career, etc. leading up to Groople. MS:
I was raised in Saginaw, a small town in Michigan. I learned a lot about what makes a business viable from my father, who was a banker in town. It was his job to make the final call on whether or not the bank would offer a business loan to a company or individual. Does the company have a solid plan? Is it a good business opportunity? Are they strong leaders? Even as I made my way up the corporate ladder, so to speak, I always thought about the traits of a business and a leader that equaled success and put them into play whether I was leading a small team or a large division. >>>

Venture Capital for MicroFinance: Chris Brookfield (Part 1)

Chris Brookfield is the Investment Director at Unitus Investment Management Company. He has been a venture capital and private equity investor his entire professional career. In 2004 he co-founded Open Water Investors. Chris has also been an Associate at Redleaf Venture Management, a Silicon Valley seed stage venture investor, and is familiar with pure play technology venture capital.

Unitus is an interesting study in successful microfinance institution financing being conducted in a for-profit environment. I recently had the opportunity to discuss Unitus and microfinance with Chris.

Microfinance has gained momentum in the last 12 months, with a number of successive milestones. >>>

Cracking the Online Video Monetization Nut: Adap.tv CEO Amir Ashkenazi (Part 1)

Amir Ashkenazi is the founder of Adap.tv, as well as the former founder and CTO of Shopping.com. Adap.tv is in the midst of the Online Video Advertising fray, on which I have recently written quite a bit. In fact, Danny Cohen suggested this conversation after reading one of those pieces about one of Adap.tv’s competitors, Scanscout. Online Video is very hot right now, but monetization is not quite happening very well yet. That is why, companies such as Adap.tv and Scanscout are important. In this discussion, we will discuss Amir, and also the segment that he is currently entrepreneuring in.

SM: Amir, I would like to start by going back to your roots. Where do you come from, where were you born, what type of family did you grow up in? AA: I was born in Israel 36 and a half years ago. I grew up nobly and aptly. I moved to the US in 1999.

SM: Did you move here as a student? AA: I started Shopping.com in 1997 while I was still in Israel. Before that I was Director of Research at a company called CommTouch. >>>