Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a 100% Virtual Company from Ireland

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

Shane Evans is Co-founder of Scrapinghub, now known as Zyte, a virtual team-based business from Ireland. When we spoke in 2016, the company had 5M Euro in revenue, 130 employees in 43 countries and operated 100% virtually. Very interesting view into a different part of the world. You can listen to the podcast of our interview here.

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?

Shane Evans: I was actually born in the UK. Both of my parents worked at Heathrow. My father is British but my mother was Irish. I think their involvement and love for travel had an impact on me. I came to Ireland when I was two years old and that’s where I grew up.

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Featured Videos

Cloud Stocks: Snowflake Helps Developers Monetize its Marketplace

The global Big Data analytics market is predicted to grow 13% annually to reach $655.53 billion by 2029. The expanding use of database across industries and the growing adoption of edge computing is driving the growth in the Big Data market. San Mateo-based Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW) is a leading data warehouse solution provider that recently announced its quarterly results.

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Gryphon CEO John Wu (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: But you would still have to sell the full product – hardware and software – if a carrier wants to work with you.

John Wu: It depends on the carrier. Some carriers have their hardware vendors picked out. They want to use their hardware vendors. We can port the software onto this hardware. Other carriers don’t mind just getting any solution. We could offer them the full solution.

Video FAQs

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Gryphon CEO John Wu (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The primary pain point around which you’re positioning your solution is this parent trying to protect children.

John Wu: Correct. That’s a very salient pain point that a lot of parents are facing today. Less so in terms of people concerned about their refrigerators getting hacked. Once you have our product, we let you know what we’re doing on the network to help you protect against hackers who are trying to hack into these devices as well.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Where do you advertise or how do you find the customers that have this pain point?

Thursday, October 20 – 594th 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable for Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 594th FREE online 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable on Thursday, October 20, 2022, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST.

If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea. You’ll receive straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and answers to any of your questions. Others can register to “attend” to watch, learn, and interact through the online chat.

You can learn more here and REGISTER TO PITCH OR ATTEND HERE. Register and you will receive the recording by email, even if you are unable to attend. Please share with any entrepreneurs in your circle who may be interested. All are welcome!

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped an Ad Tech Company from Paris

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

Europe is also facing difficult times. Entrepreneurs are its best hope. When we spoke in 2016, BidMotion Founder Daniel Nathan had built a really cool company based in Paris. Daniel is now Founder and CEO of Homa Games.

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?

Daniel Nathan: I was born very close to Paris. I was born in 1988. My parents were not entrepreneurs, but I always wanted to create my own business. I started my first company when I was pretty young. Our city was not such a great city to live in. To go to Paris, you had to take a train. It was pretty dangerous to take that train.

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Cloud Stocks: Analysis of UiPath’s Re:Infer Acquisition

The global intelligent process automation market is estimated to grow 16.5% CAGR from $9.52 billion in 2021 to reach $37.63 billion by 2030. New York-based UiPath (NYSE: PATH) recently announced its second quarter results that continued to outpace market expectations. But the weaker than expected outlook has sent its stock tumbling.

Female Entrepreneur Scaling a PropTech Venture with Over $40M in Funding: PunchListUSA CEO Min Alexander (Part 2)

Min Alexander: Along the way, you realize that real estate is one of the most un-innovative spaces. When you think about early 1998 dot com burst, it did open our society and economy to the power of technology. Why is it that all of these spaces were influenced by technology like logistics and computer science, and web marketplaces, but not real estate? That started a lot of my thoughts around so many problems. It’s all so fragmented also.

Then in 2012, I was recruited by Alta Sources Portfolio Solutions as the Head of Real Estate Services. This gave me my first opportunity to create processes and technology at scale. At that time, we were serving institutional owners of single-family residential real estate. In my free time, I started working on this business model. This was in 2014.