Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Diversyfund CEO Craig Cecilio (Part 1)

The Jobs Act has introduced the notion of democratization in investing. The issue is not as simple as it sounds. There are lots of gaps in doing this safely.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Featured Videos

From Developer to Entrepreneur with $20M in Bootstrapped Revenue: Julien Salinas, CEO of NLP Cloud (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Your customers are all developers?

Julien Salinas: Less and less, but still most of them.

Sramana Mitra: Is there a specific genre of developers? Are they developing a particular platform?

Julien Salinas: Initially, it was mainly machine learning engineers that use Python. All the machine learning engineers are Python developers. They taught me a lot of things. Then gradually, I started moving to a more global developer market. Today, I have developers who are developing on any platform and language.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a Technology Product Company from India

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

Some of us have worked relentlessly for decades to bring about the change in India from a largely services-driven technology industry to one that today produces credible products sold all over the world.

Ameyo is one of the early examples of this shift, and Co-founder CEO Sachin Bhatia is an early visionary in this journey. Ameyo was acquired by Exotel earlier this year.

Sachin is also a long-term reader of this blog. It is always a great pleasure for me to do the Entrepreneur Journeys of my long time readers who have benefited from these stories and the invaluable lessons shared by so many entrepreneurs since 2006. This is our conversation from December 2020.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?

Sachin Bhatia: I was born in New Delhi, India. I graduated from IIT. I’m a computer science graduate. I did my Bachelors in Computer Science in 2001. I have my whole family in India. My father was in the manufacturing business. In our college days, we thought that India should make some more products. That is how the journey started. I started this with a couple of my batchmates at IIT. 

>>>

Video FAQs

From Developer to Entrepreneur with $20M in Bootstrapped Revenue: Julien Salinas, CEO of NLP Cloud (Part 1)

Numerous developers around the world are turning into successful entrepreneurs. Julien provides a textbook case study of a brilliant journey that is a highly repeatable blueprint to follow.

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?

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: EdgeVerve CEO Sateesh Seetharamiah (Part 4)

Sateesh Seetharamiah: I’ll give you an example. Today, 80% of data is hidden in documents in enterprises and is very inaccessible. Why don’t we apply AI to solve this problem? Let’s build a horizontal platform – a domain-agnostic platform – to extract information. While the platform can do it, as soon as you start throwing it to a customer, they say, “What do I do with it?” It’s a very natural question.

We went through an exercise of saying, “What are the areas that we can pick?” This is a problem that’s faced by many entrepreneurs. We don’t have domain capabilities. We are technologists. We build horizontal platforms. How do I bridge that gap? We decided to engage with a customer.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Lawline to $10M

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

Wonderful story from 2020 of how Lawline CEO David Schnurman, an online education entrepreneur, had worked through plateaus and scaled his business over 15 years.

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

David Schnurman: I’m from Brooklyn, New York, an area called Park Slope. It’s a beautiful area. I grew up there until I went to college in Washington DC where I met the love of my life, who’s here with me in Barcelona. We met in college and then I moved back to New York.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Evgen Verzun, CEO of Kaizen Finance (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You work through incubators and accelerators.

Evgen Verzun: Yes. They come to us through the network. Somehow, they reach investors, right? These investors already have a successful experience with Kaizen. Investors refer us. Investors use us as crisis managers. It’s like, “We have a great project, but they have a huge problem.” We jump in and solve it. It’s tough, but we can do it very fast. It’s small pieces of the puzzle that we can put together.

Sramana Mitra: How many such customers do you have?

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: EdgeVerve CEO Sateesh Seetharamiah (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The use case that you just described works a lot better in automation than as humans. For humans to look at things and decide at what price to bid and whether to bid or not, there is no way humans can beat AI in doing something like this.

Sateesh Seetharamiah: It was done by humans. Even today.

Sramana Mitra: Wall Street traders made huge amounts of money in functions that don’t need to be done by humans.