Three Co-founders Bootstrapped with a Paycheck, Now at Over $50M Revenue: Ganesh Shankar, CEO and Co-Founder of Responsive (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So, you got to prototype in a bootstrapping with a paycheck mode. Your two co-founders who were doing the design and implementation work, stayed on working in a bootstrapping with a paycheck mode. You quit and went full-time. Then you got to a release in June of the next year, in six months. Which side did you decide to build the product for? Was it the buy side?

Ganesh Shankar: No, the sell side.

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Three Co-founders Bootstrapped with a Paycheck, Now at Over $50M Revenue: Ganesh Shankar, CEO and Co-Founder of Responsive (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Got it. Let’s go back to when you started the company. What was the premise of the company? What were you going to do?

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Three Co-founders Bootstrapped with a Paycheck, Now at Over $50M Revenue: Ganesh Shankar, CEO and Co-Founder of Responsive (Part 1)

Ganesh and his two co-founders have built Responsive with a very small amount of capital.
They started by Bootstrapping with a Paycheck. Excellent execution, much to learn on many issues.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: There’s a part that is very worrisome. Have you read Yuval Noah Harari’s most recent book, Nexus?

663rd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Krishnakumar Natarajan, Mela Ventures

Krishnakumar Natarajan, Co-founder at Mela Ventures, discusses his firm’s AI investment thesis.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I think the capabilities are extremely interesting. You can bring it down to areas where we can actually apply things like that, where there will be immediate value, and we can build a business around that.

I think interviewing candidates is one such application. Instead of ten candidates, if you want to interview 1,000 candidates and filter that down to the ten that are a good fit, that is a great application of this kind of technology or human representation technology that you’re talking about.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. If you have more example, you can discuss them. I’m very interested in seeing what is actually fine traction in the customer base.

Daniel Cohen: I’m on the board of a company called Lightricks that is doing a lot of work in the text-to-video space. The text-to-video space is in the limelight after OpenAI released Sora. What we want to think about is, how can AI create not only a short clip, but a full 5-10 minute video? The big challenge is to get fast AI-created videos results, similar to how you can get a story in text within seconds.