Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to $20M in Charleston, South Carolina

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

As part of our coverage of entrepreneurship far away from Silicon Valley, we bring you a conversation with Mike Carter, Founder of eGroup, in Charleston, South Carolina. Typically, these environments have bred bootstrapped companies, and bootstrapping using services continues to be a popular method. Here is our conversation from 2014.

Sramana Mitra: Mike, let’s start with the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of circumstances leads up to the entrepreneurial story?

Mike Carter: I was born in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina which is a coastal town here in the Southeast. My parents are both originally from the area but I grew up all around the country and some places abroad. My father was a career air force fighter pilot. That meant that he spent a lot of time traveling to different military installations around the world and as a by-product, I grew up in that environment. When I returned to Charlestown for college, I went to a military college called The Citadel. I ended up staying and getting a degree in Computer Science. I’ve been an enthusiast with technology. My passion is what got me into business. That’s what my classical education along with a desire to succeed coming from a military household brought.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Pumas.ai CEO Joga Gobburu (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch to your precision medicine area. Take me through a case study.

Joga Gobburu: What we have is an advanced clinical decision support system. This system is integrated and sits within the hospital electronic health records. When a physician diagnoses a patient with a condition and is considering a treatment, let’s say for a very serious infection.

Building Your Digital Health Startup: From Validation to Funding

Healthcare is one of the fastest-growing startup sectors.

First, a bit of my own bias on the automation versus human debate.

If you think about what a doctor needs to do to diagnose an illness, she needs to consider all the symptoms, take into account all the test results, consider all the treatment options, factor in all the side-effects of various medications and their interplay with other medications the patient is already taking. This is, effectively, a multi-variate optimization problem that a doctor has to do in her head. And, she needs to keep up with all the new research and advances in medical science, and factor those in as well. The field of medicine is full of incorrect diagnosis and mistreatment of illnesses. Now, if you replace this whole process with software, medical diagnosis becomes a truly scientific, deterministic process. I can tell you, if I have the option of being diagnosed by software versus a human doctor, I would always prefer software. It will be far more accurate.

If the medical profession can be automated to that extent, billions of people can have access to quality medical care. Today, this number is relatively low.

Entrepreneurs have a tremendous opportunity ahead.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a Robust SaaS Company from India

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

RateGain is one of the top global SaaS companies built out of India. This interview from 2014 captures Founder Bhanu Chopra’s entrepreneurial journey.

Sramana: Bhanu, let’s start with the beginning of your story. What kind of circumstances where you raised in? What is the genesis of your entrepreneurial journey?

Bhanu Chopra: I am a Delhi boy, I was born and raised in a business family in Delhi. Right after I completed school, I went to the US for my undergraduate studies. I went to Indiana University and have a double degree in finance and computer science. When I was growing up, I was very good with numbers. The advice that my father gave me was to get into something like finance. Computers are a derivation of mathematics. That is why I got interested in computers.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Pumas.ai CEO Joga Gobburu (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Were you able to get that approval?

Joga Gobburu: Yes. We got the consensus from the FDA, and they agreed to this preemptive marker. It’s underway already.

Sramana Mitra: My next question in the context of this case study is, what is it that you know from the adult trial that can be applied to the pediatric trial? What are some of the parameters that you could model?

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping with Services, Two Products, Splitting and Scaling

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

Bootstrapping with service, then building two products, then splitting up the company into two, and finally, scaling a sizable product company – not the kind of stories we hear often. This story is a rare window into the journey of a group of entrepreneurs who have achieved amazing feats. This conversation with Ajay Sharma, Co-founder and CEO of Srishti Software Applications, took place in 2014.

Sramana: Let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where are you from and what kind of family do you come from?

Ajay Sharma: I was brought up in a village in Bihar. My father was a college professor in a rural college. It was actually rather common at that time for professors to pass through rural areas at some point of their career to help bolster those smaller, rural colleges. I attended rural schools until the tenth class. I then moved to another small, sleepy agricultural town for the eleventh and twelfth classes.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Pumas.ai CEO Joga Gobburu (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’d like to explore two directions based on what you said. Have you actually developed a drug using this methodology or have you facilitated drug development for a pharmaceutical? If you’re allowed to talk about that, I want to do a use case of stepping through the whole process.

Joga Gobburu: Absolutely.

The Paradigm Shift in EdTech: Why Online Learning Startups Are the Future

Online learning has exploded in popularity over the last decade. In Covid, the field has found a tremendous force multiplier.

Many founders are now turning to online education for startup ideas. Here’s why: it can be extremely profitable because online courses do not require physical classrooms, startup costs are more affordable, and startup time frames are shorter. The ability to scale fast makes this space very attractive for new ventures.

The education world has made a shift in the last decade from a sage-on-stage model to a guide-on-side model. In the former, teachers lectured to students in an auditorium format. In the latter, kids were assigned YouTube or Khan Academy videos as homework, and they did exercises in class with the teacher assisting as needed.

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