Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a Freemium Business with a Paycheck

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

Aytekin Tank, Founder and CEO of JotForm, is a Turkish entrepreneur who bootstrapped his company with a paycheck. When we spoke in 2015, he was using a freemium business model, and a virtual team strategy to scale.

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

Aytekin Tank: I was born in Istanbul. I spent my childhood moving from city to city since my family worked for the government. Constantly having to adapt and make friends instilled in me an appreciation for different cultures and meeting new people. We have offices in San Francisco and in Turkey. We have remote workers in 20 countries.

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Cloud Stocks: Veeva CRM will Move to Vault Platform

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC (Part 1)

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Video FAQs

Best of Bootstrapping: Peruvian Entrepreneur Bootstrapped to $200M

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.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Zetaris CEO Vinay Samuel (Part 3)

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.”

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Zetaris CEO Vinay Samuel (Part 2)

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.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to $15M in Three Years

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.

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Cloud Stocks: Why is Salesforce Stock Down?

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%.