1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Steve Eskenazi, Angel Investor (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I was talking to Eric Benhamou two days ago. He was like, “I’m looking for a good application or use case for NFT.” What about exits? What have you seen through your investments?

Steve Eskenazi: I think there are a couple of tried and true methodologies. I think the best company gets bought and not sold. You have to build companies the right way and you have to scale them the right way. Throwing money at problems is not a solution.

Featured Videos

Catching Up On Readings: State of Web3

This feature from The Wall Street Journal by Christopher Mims decodes the status of Web3 following the crash of the world’s crypto prices. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Colors: Printemps III

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 – one of my paintings – 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 – Printemps III

Printemps III | Sramana Mitra, 2020 | Watercolor, Pastel, Brush Pen | 9  x 12, On Paper

Video FAQs

20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: The open-source was a commercial open source business model where the free product was lead generating for a subscription-based offering?

Scott Sellers: Right. We still have free downloads of the open-source software. We encourage people to use it in an unrestricted manner. The business monetization model is selling commercial support services, which include the obvious thing of answering the phones. More importantly, it’s things like timely security updates and long-term access to builds.

Colors: Printemps II

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 – one of my paintings – 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 – Printemps II

Printemps II | Sramana Mitra, 2020 | Watercolor, Pastel, Brush Pen | 9  x 12, On Paper

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Steve Eskenazi, Angel Investor (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Here’s a trend question. You have watched the music business for a long time. What is your analysis of the music business? We see music deals from time to time. A lot of the industry believes that you can’t make money in the music business. Can you talk about that?

Steve Eskenazi: I don’t look at it as binary. Some people say you can’t make money. I think it’s very selectively investable. That has been my approach. I was a private investor in Spotify as well. I’ve raised the bar on music deals more than I would in other spaces. I would probably agree that it’s really tough to make money in the music space.

20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: From 2002 to 2008, you already had a lot of VC in the company. It’s already six years, so the VCs are starting to get antsy. How did you handle that?

Scott Sellers: It was one of the most challenging aspects. We needed to change our investor base. The current investors had invested in a hardware business model. We had raised a ton of money. We had started to reach the limits realistically of what the existing investor base could do.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping Tuft & Needle to Over $100M

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

Online mattress is one of the hottest e-commerce category these days, and here is yet another one delivering venture-scale growth without venture capital. Tuft & Needle Co-founder JT Marino shared his story with me in 2017.

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?

JT Marino: I was born in Phoenix, but I grew up in Pennsylvania. I went to Penn State. That’s where I met my co-founder, Daehee Park. From there, my career took me to Silicon Valley working for several startups. That’s where my co-founder and I stuck together. We were at a company at Palo Alto and we decided that we wanted to build something of our own. Based on our previous experience with startups, we wanted to do it a different way.

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