Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC, discusses his firm’s investment thesis, and we have an interesting discussion about the definition of a “good” entrepreneur.
>>>If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.
We hear a lot from Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs. We hear some from Europeans. But thus far, not as much from Latin American entrepreneurs. WEI President Belisario Rosas is Peruvian, and is also interested in fostering further entrepreneurship in Latin America. This is our conversation from 2015.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and what kind of background?
Belisario Rosas: I was born in Lima, Peru.
Vinay Samuel: Seven years ago, I was sitting in a think tank with a group of people after we had exited. We said, “Do we do another centralized data warehousing platform? Do we do another Green Plum or Vertica?” The future we saw was a future that said, “In our journey, no customer had achieved that single view of all their data. Every customer we knew had data everywhere. They still had lots of data marts, data streams, and files.”
>>>Sramana Mitra: Are you taking this use case and trying to sell this use case to other healthcare providers?
Vinay Samuel: Absolutely. Zetaris has been in the market for about seven years. It took us five years to build our technology. In every industry, there’s the top 10 killer use cases that we accelerate. As we find these projects, we are finding partners to take them to market. We look at a partner who’s strong in healthcare or telco and we’ll pass the IP over. We deal with all the big consulting firms. We got partnerships with SI’s [system integrators]. We identify which is the appropriate SI or consulting firm to take this use case forward.
>>>If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.
Extraordinarily tight, disciplined strategy and execution has enabled Connatix Founder CEO David Kashak to build a tremendously fast growth company with a small team. A lot to learn from our conversation in 2016.
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?
David Kashak: I was born in Israel. I grew up in Israel and studied engineering at Tel Aviv University. After studying, I started as a programmer in a cyber security company in Israel. At one point, they offered to relocate me to New York. That offer was very interesting because I wanted to get more exposure to business. I moved to New York.
Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) recently announced its third-quarter results that outpaced market targets. Despite the strong results, the departure of its Co-CEO, Bret Taylor, and a decline in demand sent the stock falling 5%.
>>>A very interesting innovation in data virtualization.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as your company.
Vinay Samuel: I’m the CEO and Founder of Zetaris. We are changing the way data analysis is done in large enterprises. The traditional model is to collect data from different source systems across the enterprise and the internet and bring it into a data warehouse or data lake.
>>>If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.
I have always said that you need to bootstrap your way to validation and traction. ProjectManager.com Founder Jason Westland did just that, and built a robust company from New Zealand. Read on, it’s a fabulous story from 2016.
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?
Jason Westland: That’s further back in time than I expected. I’m from New Zealand in the Southern Alps. My first job was managing a project of 25 people. I was 22, just out of university. I was in project management until around 15 years ago when I became the General Manager of a software company that grew fast. I was inspired to start my own business based on reporting to a Board that I learned a lot from. This is the third business that I’ve started.