According to a recent report, the global enterprise collaboration market is expected to grow 15% to $54.88 billion this year and grow at 14% CAGR to reach $92.4 billion by 2027. Atlassian (Nasdaq: TEAM) recently announced its third quarter results that surpassed market expectations.
>>>This report from CB Insights covers the funding trends in the AI space. While lobal AI funding plunged in the quarter, the number of unicorns was steady. Three Generative AI unicorns joined the club this quarter including Anthropic, Adept, and Character.AI. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.
>>>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 – Thunderstorm II
Thunderstorm II | Sramana Mitra, 2021 | Watercolor, Pastel, Brush Pen | 9 x 12, On Paper
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 – Thunderstorm I
Thunderstorm I | Sramana Mitra, 2021 | Watercolor, Pastel, Brush Pen | 9 x 12, On Paper
Sramana Mitra: Data is clearly going to change the pharmaceutical industry.
Susan Wood: Similarly to find sites. Here are 50 sites that do high-quality imaging work. We went into this by getting imaging biomarkers. That’s an important thing, but more importantly, there are so many disconnects and inefficiencies in running these trials that our data can help in other ways.
>>>If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.
Our tried-and-true mantra of Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later rings throughout Dave Elkington’s story. As the Founder of InsideSales.com, he used services to bootstrap a Unicorn that had raised close to $140 million in VC funding when we spoke in 2015. Revenue was scaling 100% year over year then. InsideSales.com became known as XANT and was acquired by Aurea Software in 2021.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised, and in what kind of circumstances?
Dave Elkington: I grew up in Utah. I went to school here. My parents are both school teachers and worked for the state and federal government. It was a little bit atypical. My dad was a rancher growing up in Idaho. My mom is from Canada. When people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would tell them I wanted to be a millionaire. They would ask why. I’d be like, “Not for the money, but purely for the sake of accomplishment of being able to do that.” I went to school locally. My education is a little bit eclectic. I have an undergraduate degree in Philosophy. I also have minors in Hebrew, Japanese History, and Business. I also studied, for about a year, in Israel. I decided I wanted to go get some international experience and I had family in Israel. I dropped out of school at BYU and applied to the Hebrew University. I got accepted and transferred credits. I did that for a little over a year, dropped out of school, and applied to BYU. I got re-accepted and then finished at BYU.
In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:
During this week’s roundtable, our focus was on customer acquisition strategy.
Rezeve
First up, we had Adrian Ng from Singapore pitch Rezeve, a software for running small services businesses.
Youzentech Technologies
Next, we had Rajkapoor Singh from Bangalore, India, pitch Youzentech Technologies, a semiconductor chip verification company.
You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here: