Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a Virtual Company with a Paycheck

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

FormAssembly Founder and CEO Cedric Savarese’s story is a textbook case study of the kind of entrepreneur we want to see emerge and grow in every corner of the world: a solo entrepreneur who is a developer and a product guy capable of getting to validation while holding onto a day job. When we spoke in 2019, Cedric had almost 50 employees spread around the world, and while it maintained a small office of fewer than 10 people in Indiana, the bulk of the company had scaled as a virtual workforce. Excellent model, and I encourage aspiring entrepreneurs to read this carefully.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Cedric Savarese: I was born in France and expatriated to the US. I grew up in a small town not so far from Paris.

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Featured Videos

Apple Delivers Lackluster Performance

Earlier this month, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) announced its fourth quarter results that failed to truly impress the market. Its sales fell for the fourth consecutive quarter. Its stock fell 3% in the after-hours trading session after Apple suggested that it may not return to growth in the holiday quarter.

Roundtable Recap: November 9 – Broad, Generic Value Propositions Don’t Work

During this week’s roundtable, we had two very diverse pitches.

Move2.AI

First we had Bruno Quemener in Rennes, France, pitch Move2.AI. Bruno aims to offer AI innovation consulting to enterprises. My take is that this is too broad a value proposition and needs to be tightened.

Labby

Then Julia Somerdin from Boston, Massachusetts, pitched Labby, a milk testing technology.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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Video FAQs

Building a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What did AI do that was really unique to your product?

Swapnil Jain: We’ve always used LLMs in our tech stack. The key technology was transcription. A human doesn’t need to listen to a call. We can make it much more easier for them to understand the call. Then we also built a lot of NLP technology to further crystallize that. They won’t even have to go through the transcript or look at the keywords. We can just give them a summary. This was all not possible before.

Catching Up On Readings: Top 10 Accelerators

This report from CB Insights features the top 10 most active startup accelerators and their investment patterns. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Building a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: We are in the 2018 timeframe now?

Swapnil Jain: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What are the next few strategic moves that got you further?

Swapnil Jain: 2019 was a big product year. We had a product that we were shipping every day, but we didn’t know if this was strategic or not. The big strategic decision in 2019 was getting a strong VP of Product. If I look back, that is something I should have done sooner. I acted as a product leader, but I was not good.

Colors: Commune I

I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I am about art and culture. In this series, I will typically publish a piece of art – one of my paintings – and I request you to spend a minute or two deeply meditating on it. I urge you to watch your feelings, thoughts, reactions to the piece, and write what comes to you, what thoughts it triggers, in the dialog area. Let us see what stimulation this interaction yields. For today – Commune I

Commune I | Sramana Mitra, 2021 | Watercolor, Pastel, Brush Pen | 8  x 8, On Paper

Building a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: A lot of pre-seed investments happen in the alumni network. An engineer in a branded company like Twitter works.

Swapnil Jain: Of course. The other thing I would say is the Bay Area is more lenient in terms of supporting people. Did I have a great idea? Maybe. Maybe not. People’s willingness to support is also a big factor. It’s the pay-it-forward kind of thing.