Colors: Las Casas en el Bosque Mexicano

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 – a painting, a poem, a piece of music, so forth – 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 – Las Casas en el Bosque Mexicano

Las Casas en el Bosque Mexicano | Sramana Mitra, 2013 | Water color, Brush Pen, Ink and Pastel | 12 x 18, On Paper

Related Reading: Build Me This Travelogue App, Please!

Featured Videos

Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Company: Modded Euros CEO Sean Dawes (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What about inventory financing? Did you finance it all out of revenue or did you do some sort of bank financing?

Sean Dawes: We did a combination of self-financing and bank financing.

Sramana Mitra: Could you give us a range of what level of bank financing you used to leverage the company?

May 22 – Rendezvous Meetup Discussing the Probability of Raising Funds for Your Startup

For entrepreneurs interested to meet and chat with Sramana Mitra in person, please join us for our bi-monthly and informal group meetups. If you are living in the San Francisco Bay Area or are just in town for a visit, we hope you will add these meetups to your calendar and join us. Pre-registration is required, REGISTER HERE.

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Video FAQs

Square Thriving Through Acquisitions and PaaS

Earlier this month, mobile payments platform Square (NYSE: SQ) announced its first quarter results. While the results outpaced market expectations, a lackluster first quarter outlook disappointed the market and the stock fell 8% since the result announcement.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sumant Mandal of March Capital Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I was commenting on your 10 to 11 years, but not just 10 to 11 years. Some companies are going 15 to 20 years and then finding exits like Lynda.com. When she had a unicorn exit, they had been around for almost 20 years.

We have a company in our portfolio that is also something like 15 years old that completely bootstrapped with no financing, and it just sold for $60 million. There’s a lot of that going on at the moment. I’m just trying to understand how you view it from a timeline point of view and from a slightly larger venture fund point of view.

Best of Bootstrapping: How The Intern Group CEO David Lloyd Bootstrapped to $13 Million

I am very bullish about market opportunities that are large enough to build sizable businesses but not large enough such that VCs end up funding numerous competing companies. This case study shows you how a niche player with a $150 million TAM is growing nicely without outside financing.

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 Lloyd: I’m from the UK. I was born in London. I spent the first 22 years of my life in London before spending approximately the last 10 years of my life between London and Latin America.

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Roundtable Recap: May 16 – Spotlight on Mexico

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest, Hernan Fernandez, Managing Partner at Angel Ventures Mexico. The firm invests in Mexico, Chile, Peru and Colombia. Excellent discussion on Latin America trends.

Lightwing

As for the entrepreneur pitches, from Bangalore, India, we had Ravitej Yadalam pitch Lightwing, a cloud monitoring and optimization solution for SMEs.

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Bootstrapping a Niche E-Commerce Company: Modded Euros CEO Sean Dawes (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What are the key inflection points? What strategic moves have you made that led to this?

Sean Dawes: For us, it was being able to offer similar content generation that we were used to working with when we worked in-house. We launched our own content video series where we’d purchase vehicles and show the customer what they could do to the vehicle.