623rd 1Mby1M Roundtable for Entrepreneurs Starting NOW: Live Tweeting by @1Mby1M

Today’s 623rd FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable for Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, October 26, 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!   

Featured Videos

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Travel Experiences Business to $5M

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

Under30Experiences Co-founder Matt Wilson has built a fantastic business using content marketing to sell travel experiences to young adults. Very cool! Here is our conversation from 2019.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where did you grow up and in what kind of background?

Matt Wilson: I grew up in upstate New York. I grew up in a little tiny town called Stormville, New York. It’s about 60 minutes outside of New York City. It’s not really that close to the city, but it wasn’t extremely rural. I just started being an enterprising young man whether it was by mowing lawns or picking golf balls out of the local ponds. Selling the golf balls on eBay was my first online business. That really ignited the passion for entrepreneurship. Baseball cards would probably be the other thing that I was really passionate about when I was younger.

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623rd Roundtable for Entrepreneurs Starting in 30 Minutes: Live Tweeting by @1Mby1M

Today’s 623rd FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable for Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, October 26, 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!

Video FAQs

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping from AZ to $10M

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

After putting the spotlight on Entrepreneurship in Arizona, I spoke with Pagely CEO Joshua Strebel. In 2019, he shared another terrific story of bootstrapping success from Arizona.

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?

Joshua Strebel: I was born in a little town in Idaho called Soda Springs. I’m the youngest of nine children. I grew up primarily in Las Vegas, Nevada and was splitting time within Salt Lake City, Utah. My parents were divorced when I was younger, so I went back and forth between households. I finished high school in Salt Lake City and ended up in Arizona where I went to college at Northern Arizona University.
Sramana Mitra: When was it that you came out of college?

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Cloud Stocks: Microsoft Begins Monetizing AI

Yesterday, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) announced its first quarter results that surpassed market expectations. The market was impressed, and the stock gained 4% in the after hours trading session.

Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Language models have evolved a lot.

Arvind Jain: There is that vision for the future. The nature of knowledge work is going to change. We are going to have these powerful assistants that are going to take care of most of the repetitive time-consuming tasks as well as the tedious parts of search. While the technology is powerful, it’s also very hard to make it work for you. There are problems with instability in the sense that you can ask the same question four times and it comes back with a different answer each time.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Unicorn Startups

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

While it doesn’t happen that often, Bootstrapped Unicorns do exist.

My 2014 Entrepreneur Journeys book, Billion Dollar Unicorns, has a whole section on this topic. You can read an excerpt on my blog titled Bootstrapped Unicorns. In this piece, I discuss three companies, Zoho, eClinicalWorks, and Veeam, that have bootstrapped to about a billion dollars in revenues.

Revenues NOT valuation.

That puts their valuations in the five to ten billion range or beyond. So they are Unicorns (billion dollar valuation) many times over.

You can also read an interview with Sridhar Vembu of Zoho here that describes the early journey of the company: Happily Bootstrapping: Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu.

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Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to ask you this question, computer scientist to computer scientist. Really great work in search is a matter of great algorithms. Algorithms are not necessarily people intensive. Five people can write great algorithms. Is this really a people-intensive business? Google was never a people-intensive business. They hire a lot of people, but the core products were not scaling by hiring people.