Best of Bootstrapping: Serial Entrepreneur Bootstrapped PropTech Ventures

LuxuryProperty Founder Jason Hayes has worked at the cusp of real estate and digital marketing for 35 years and built three successful ventures. All of them are bootstrapped, organically grown, and capital efficient businesses. Here is our discussion from 2023.

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?

Jason Hayes: I’m speaking to you from Dubai. I was born in the UK, brought up in Sri Lanka, and I’ve spent time living and working in the Barbardos and California. I’ve been in Dubai for nearly eight years now. I consider myself a global citizen.

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698th 1Mby1M Roundtable for Entrepreneurs Starting in 10 Minutes

Today’s 698th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable for Entrepreneurs is starting in 10 minutes, on Thursday, August 14, at 8 a.m. PDT / 11 a.m. EDT / 5 p.m. CEST / 8:30 p.m. India IST. CLICK HERE to join. PASSWORD: startup  All are welcome!

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Amir Kabir, Overlook Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So, you said you were looking for three things. Number one is the founder and really the founder-problem fit. What are the other two things that you’re looking for?

Video FAQs

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Amir Kabir, Overlook Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You are investing in risk and data-driven risk products. This domain requires people who are working in some domain-specific use cases around all that. Otherwise, you don’t really have insights into the problems to solve, right?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Amir Kabir, Overlook Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. And what is the investment thesis of Overlook Ventures?

Do Not Chase Investors Before Chasing Customers

Sridhar Vembu built Zoho with zero outside funding to a billion-dollar ARR SaaS company. I wrote the first piece ever written on him in 2007 in my Forbes column. No one had yet heard of Zoho. But VCs were already salivating.

Sridhar validated my philosophy of how I advise startups when he came to see me in 2007.

My philosophy has remained the same at its core.

Do not go to VCs as beggars. Go as Kings.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Amir Kabir, Overlook Ventures (Part 1)

Amir Kabir, Founding Partner at Overlook Ventures, discusses his new firm’s investment Thesis around Risk. In addition, we had a great discussion on what younger aspiring entrepreneurs should do: jump into entrepreneurship right away, or learn a domain in a job.

Top Startup Accelerators Focused on Validation in Central Asia

This article summarizes the top startup accelerators focused on validation in Central Asia and compares them to 1Mby1M.

Guest Author Altynai Myrzabekova | Reviewed by Sramana Mitra

Across Central Asia—from Almaty to Tashkent to Bishkek—ambitious founders are entering accelerators hoping for a clear path to traction. But for many, the journey ends in a pitch deck, not a product that sells.

This disconnect is what Sramana Mitra calls the “Validation Vacuum.” It’s a recurring theme in her 60-part series, The Accelerator Conundrum, which explores how many accelerators overlook one critical step: proving there’s a real market need before building or scaling.