Andrus Oks is Founding Partner at Tera Ventures, based in Estonia. We have a great discussion on entrepreneurship in the Baltic and Scandinavian countries in particular.
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In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:
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 – Fall Reverie III
Fall Reverie III | Sramana Mitra, 2020 | Watercolor, Pastel, Brush Pen | 9 x 12, On Paper
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.
I am sure you are following the Bootstrapping to Exit (let’s call it B2E) articles. Last time, I showed you some case studies of larger companies who are acquiring bootstrapped startups.
In this post, I will double-click down on the buy-side psychology of the B2E phenomenon.
There are several factors that play into a relatively larger company acquiring a smaller player.
During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Andrus Oks, Founding Partner at Tera Ventures, based in Estonia. We had a great discussion on the Baltic and Scandinavian countries in particular.
Peep
As for entrepreneur pitches, today we had Elif Aydin from New York, pitching PeeP, an app for identifying street parking. Also an excellent discussion.
You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:
Often niche ideas are great to build capital-efficient, profitable startups on.
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?
Joris Kroese: I was born in a small village close to Amsterdam. I was born in 1977. I studied Information Engineering. After my studies, I started my first venture which was an e-commerce venture selling, mainly, consumer electronics in Benelux and Spain. I did that for about 10 years.
>>>IBM (NYSE: IBM) recently announced its first-quarter results that continued to outpace market expectations. The company remains focused on growing through acquisitions as it added another private player to its portfolio. IBM’s performance had been declining for a while, but it appears to have made a rebound with the company delivering three straight quarters of positive growth.
>>>Sramana Mitra: There is a tool that I use when we teach our entrepreneurs about building a sales funnel. We call it pain extraction questions. When you start discussions, you ask questions about a pain. What is your first pain extraction question?
Mahendra Alladi: How often do you get bit by a production bug? How many escalations do you take because of delayed release cycles? The answers are also very common. This is something that is a burning issue. I don’t really have to sell a lot. The problem is easily acknowledged.
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