During this week’s roundtable, we had four excellent discussions. For those of you following these roundtables and the recordings, especially if you’re primarily in the learning phase, please use them as case studies and exercises that you can work on. Ask yourself how would you process my feedback? Put yourself in the investor’s shoes. Put yourself in the entrepreneur’s shoes.
MADSTO
First up, we had Prashanth Sathri from Bangalore, India, pitch MADSTO, a plus sized men’s clothing brand from India.
Zosper
Next, we had Diana Tkhamadokova from Dubai, UAE, pitch Zosper, a personalization front-end for fashion retailers.
Pabloo
Then Pabloo Alsahlani from San Francisco, California, pitched Pabloo, an app for processing store-credit for retailers of fashion and footwear.
Skimmet
Next M’Lisa Ellis from Las Vegas, Nevada, pitched Skimmet, a social media tracking app for brand mentions.
You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:
Recently, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced its first-quarter results that surpassed market expectations. Amid recessionary fears, Amazon has been announced a series of layoffs that helped it earn strong profit in the quarter.
>>>Sramana Mitra: How is it working with your brother?
Tigran Petrosyan: Many people tell me that they would never work with their siblings. When you do it right, it can be a blessing. We have done quite a lot of work early on to make sure that not only the brotherhood works, but also the business side works.
We’ve gone a very long way. You can trust each other. You know that you rely on each other and you can be safe. Having that backup all the time is critical, especially when you’re building something new and innovative. The rate of failure can be high.
>>>Sramana Mitra: After raising that $100,000, you went to the accelerator. Did the accelerator give you some money?
Tigran Petrosyan: Yes. It was $100,000.
Sramana Mitra: Is there any other investment?
Tigran Petrosyan: We had a few other angels and pre-seed. The big part came when we raised our seed round in early 2020 with Point9 Capital. It’s one of the most highly-respected European VC firms. That $3 million helped us expand our operations and build a go-to market in the US and Europe.
>>>Sramana Mitra: What emerged as your target market?
Tigran Petrosyan: This is a good question. Machine learning can be applied to all kinds of industries. Initially, our target was computer vision. Basically, those who use images to get intelligence out of images. This was our niche.
We started to build an engine to attract clients. It went through a few iterations and another six months before we realized that what we were building is much more than an annotation platform. There’s a big pain about the platform itself as a standalone software solution. We released that in early 2020.
>>>If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.
iText CEO Bruno Lowagie bootstrapped a highly profitable company from Belgium. Since our conversation in 2015, iText was acquired by ThinkFree in 2018.
Sramana Mitra: Where are you from?
Bruno Lowagie: I’m from Belgium.
Sramana Mitra: I’m married to a Belgian. Were you born and raised in Belgium?
Alphabet aka Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) recently reported its first-quarter results that topped the market’s expectations. As the company deals with a weak online ad market, it has been accelerating its cost management focus to ensure it turns into a leaner organization.
>>>Sramana Mitra: When you applied to the Berkeley accelerator, how much time passed between your $100,00 funding to the accelerator?
Tigran Petrosyan: We got accepted to Berkeley after two months and then into the program after four months.
Sramana Mitra: How long were you in the accelerator?
>>>