Colors: Woods 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 – Woods I

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

Featured Videos

Best of Bootstrapping: Student Developers Bootstrapped with a Paycheck to 1M Users

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

TryHackMe CEO Ben Spring and his co-founder are two techies who started by bootstrapping with a paycheck. With zero marketing budget, they have scaled TryHackMe to a million users and significant revenue.

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?

Ben Spring: I was born and raised in Portsmouth, England. I also went to the University of Portsmouth. I have a degree in Computer Science.

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Cloud Stocks: Oracle’s New Release Focuses on Developers

Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) recently reported its second quarter results that were in line with the market’s expectations. The company is focusing on making its products more focused on developers to improve its product adoption.

Video FAQs

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Comet ML CEO Gideon Mendels (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Of the millions of people who are pursuing a machine learning career as a citizen data scientist track, data scientist track, or a developer track, in what time frame will that impact industry?

Gideon Mendels: It’s a gradual change. It’s already impacting the industry. When I studied computer science, there weren’t any machine learning courses in the curriculum. You can take one as optional. Today it’s core. Even if they start in a software engineering role, having that knowledge is significant. The impact started five to seven years ago.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a World-Class AI Startup First, Raised Money Later

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

Raghu Ravinutala, CEO of Yellow.ai, has built an incredible AI startup from India with a global base of enterprise clients. Fabulous story!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as the genesis of Yellow.ai.

Raghu Ravinutala: I’m the Co-Founder and CEO of Yellow.ai. Yellow.ai enables enterprises to drive automation on their customer experiences and employee experience by integrating a whole set of enterprise data and delivering phenomenal experiences that the companies can leverage for sales, marketing, HR, and IT automation.

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Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Comet ML CEO Gideon Mendels (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: There seems to be a very large number of developers who are learning Python and are either practicing or aspiring machine learning engineers. The number is in the millions. What are these people doing?

Gideon Mendels: As in how are they learning?

Sramana Mitra: What is the application? What is the career path? Is the industry active enough to absorb five million ML developers?

The Power of Bootstrapping: Achieving Small Exits for Capital-Efficient Startups

I’m a big advocate for building small, capital-efficient startups. Not all entrepreneurs need to chase Unicorns. Not all investors need to chase Unicorns. There are many more viable ideas for those smaller ventures and there are considerably more opportunities for their exits, which means cashing in earlier on your hard work.

One type of exit is under $50 million, and to achieve that, your strategy should be to build a capital-efficient company that shows product-market fit in an efficient, bootstrapped manner.

That capital-efficient strategy is required for all stakeholders to make money when harvesting through smaller exits.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped an E-commerce Startup with a Paycheck to Exit

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

There are roll-ups of e-commerce brands going on right now. This case study delves into one such that has exited into a roll-up effort.

Jay Perkins, Co-founder of Kettlebell Kings, currently runs Living.Fit which produces digital workouts, fitness education courses, and fitness equipment.

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

Jay Perkins: I was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. In 2004, I moved to Austin, Texas to go to college at the University of Texas. Pretty soon after arriving in Austin, I just fell in love with it. I felt like this was an incredible place to be in.

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