If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.
Identity Automation Founder James Litton built an identity management software company from Houston and then went upmarket. Here is our conversation 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 circumstances?
James Litton: I am a native Houstonian. I’m a rare breed. I was born and raised in Houston. In terms of circumstances, I think I’m from your quintessential American middle-class family.
Despite the uncertain macro-economic conditions, enterprise services provider Workday (NASDAQ: WDAY) feels confident in its ability to deliver. It believes that its cloud-based finance and HR solutions are mission-critical to organizations, making Workday relatively resilient to economic conditions. Its recently announced third quarter results continued to surpass market expectations.
>>>Sramana Mitra: Firstly, what is the size of your deal flow? How many deals do you see?
Giuseppe Donvito: When we started, we used to do a mix of post-seed and early stage. We used to see a thousand companies per year, out of which, our investment rate was 5% per year. Now that we’ve moved to a more later stage, we see probably 500 deals a year and we do only 1%. In those typical stats, we don’t explore 50% and the other half we do some analysis.
>>>Over the years, we have developed a proven methodology for building tech startups. We have packaged the 1Mby1M methodology into short courses on Udemy. This is an extension of our strategy to democratize entrepreneurship education at scale, globally.
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According to a recent report, the enterprise cloud computing market is expected to grow 18% annually over the next few years to reach $1.25 trillion by 2027 from $545.8 billion in 2021. Nutanix (Nasdaq: NTNX), recently announced its first quarter results that outpaced market expectations.
>>>Giuseppe Donvito is Partner at P101 Ventures based in Milan. We have a wonderful conversation about Italian startups.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you and get acquainted ourselves as well.
Giuseppe Donvito: I’m a Partner at P101. I’ve been in the venture capital and private equity industry for more than 20 years. I have a Masters in Telecommunications Engineering, an MBA, and completed an advanced executive course at Northwestern University at Chicago.
>>>If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.
This is a wonderful story from 2016 of a serial bootstrapper, then Tanga CEO, Jeremy Young. He built a wonderful e-commerce business similar to Groupon, but with no outside money.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s got back to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
Jeremy Young: I was born in Spokane, Washington. My dad had ended up moving our family across the border to Idaho, which is about 45 minutes away. That’s where I grew up. I have six brothers and sisters—two older brothers and four younger sisters. I was raised in a middle lower class home. My dad worked the same job for 30 years. My oldest brother, Jeff, who is five years older than me ended up getting several jobs while he was in high school and got me interested in business and work in general. He’s a role model to me. He worked very hard and always had lots of money. He was able to buy cars, stereo equipments, and video games. I learned from him and really wanted to earn money as well.
Sramana Mitra: In the previous example that you gave about stock markets and hurricanes, how do you adjust? Let’s say you have a Black Swan event, how do you put that into the model? That’s an interesting use case.
Jim Rebesco: It’s really interesting. This double-clicks on that notion that the data that goes into a model needs to look like data that’s going to be run in production. In a Black Swan event, the very core answer is how quickly can I gather a new dataset from the outside world. If you say there were X number of hurricanes in the past, and you see a hurricane that looks like those. It could be true or it might not be true.
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