Extending Product Roadmaps with Generative AI: Acrolinx CEO Volker Smid (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happened in 2015?

Volker Smid: I decided to go back to my roots.

Sramana Mitra: Start another company?

Volker Smid: No, I was joining a company with very little revenue. It was the second largest SEO platform in the world called Searchmetrics. I became the CEO of Searchmetrics to get the company from small revenue to being successful outside Germany. We had to get rid of litigations that we had in the US which were cumbersome and expensive. It was another learning experience.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped First Venture, Raised Money for the Next

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

As a variation on our ‘Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later’ theme, we also see many entrepreneurs who have bootstrapped a first company (or business), and then gone onto venture-fund a second. Christian Chabot built Tableau Software in this mode. Sridhar Vembu built Zoho. We have numerous examples of this tried-and-true path. Something to consider for first-time entrepreneurs chasing venture capital and Unicorns. Since speaking with cVidya Founder Alon Aginsky in 2015, cVidya was acquired by Amdocs in 2016.

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

Alon Aginsky: I was born and raised in Israel. After completing my army duty, I found myself in New York as a young entrepreneur trying to make it. Luckily, I was able to pick an opportunity and start a company in the area of call accounting that later became billing for small operators. That company that I started was a one-man show in the Empire State Building. I managed, after seven years, to take it public on NASDAQ.

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Extending Product Roadmaps with Generative AI: Acrolinx CEO Volker Smid (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after?

Volker Smid: Fulfilled my lifelong dream to go to the US. It was in 2000.

Sramana Mitra: To what company?

Volker Smid: It was a US-German company that went public in the year 2000. It was called Poet. We had a marketplace catalog product, which was a big thing in the year 2000. Every marketplace needed to have a catalog and we were the catalog provider. If you remember 2000, it was a pretty crazy time.

Video FAQs

Extending Product Roadmaps with Generative AI: Acrolinx CEO Volker Smid (Part 1)

In this conversation, Volker discusses how his company is extending its product line with Generative AI, and also, very specific new startup ideas leveraging the capabilities of Generative AI.

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

Catching Up On Readings: AI Regulation

This feature from The Financial Times by Marietje Schaake, International policy director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, discusses why CEOs should be kept away from AI regulation. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped While in School, Raised Money Later

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

True to our mantra, Co-founder Mark Newman bootstrapped HireVue to $1M in revenue before raising the first funding. When we spoke in 2015, the company had raised a total of $92 million, and was doing $30 million in revenue. Excellent case study to study!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your story. Tell us where you’re from, where you were born and raised, and in what kind of circumstances.

Mark Newman: I was born in Northern Canada, about 400 miles north of Toronto, in a small town called Timmons. I was a mining industry brat. My dad designed and built the copper smelters. He was a chemistry and metallurgy nut whose favorite thing was taking rocks and turning them into solid bars of something. Living up there, you were able to be blissfully unaware. You live in a small little town. You had chances to go to lakes and kick through trees.

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New Student Entrepreneur Startups Course and June Udemy Course Coupons

We have packaged our proven 1Mby1M methodology for building technology startups into short courses on Udemy as a part of our aim to democratize entrepreneurship education at scale globally.

In addition to offering you up to 85% off the following Udemy courses this month, we are introducing the new course, Student Entrepreneur Startup Case Studies. Through this course, we explore our most informative and inspirational case studies of noteworthy startups founded by student entrepreneurs.

These coupons will expire on June 30, 2023, so enroll today!

Bootstrapping:

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later with Sramana Mitra: TRY1MBY1MJUN2023BTS

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Capital Efficient Strategy for Generative AI Startups: Aisera CEO Muddu Sudhakar (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The PaaS business is getting harder and harder to do because the big players are so entrenched. It’s so expensive. The stack is so expensive from an infrastructure and computing point of view. You can’t really play the PaaS game as a startup anymore. Let’s switch to what you’re seeing on the go-to-market side.

When you were doing the beginning phase of Aisera, AI was not in the mainstream. The demand in the enterprise for AI-enabled solutions was not as strong. Now, the conversation has shifted. C-levels are talking about it. This must be making life easier for you.