Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping to $30M from Florida

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

SproutLoud CEO Jared Shusterman bootstrapped his company with his bar mitzvah money. He shared his wonderful 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?

Jared Shusterman: I was born in Miami, Florida. I’m one of the few South Florida natives. I grew up in a middle class family that had a very heavy focus on education. After I graduated high school, I went to the University of Virginia. I got a Bachelors degree with a concentration in Finance and Marketing. Shortly after that, I moved out to San Francisco and worked for an investment bank in the online media practice. That’s the quick summary of my initial upbringing.

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577th Roundtable for Entrepreneurs Starting NOW: Live Tweeting by @1Mby1M

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Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with a little bit of your background. Tell us about what path you have traveled.

Steve Eskenazi: My career has three distinct phases. In the 1990s, I was Wall Street’s digital media analyst introducing Wall Street to companies like America Online and Electronic Arts. For the next 10 years, I was a venture capitalist for a firm called Walden VC where we invested in internet, SaaS, and digital media companies.

20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you spin the Java story?

Scott Sellers: The other two founders worked for a company called Shasta Networks. This was in the late 90s. It was a cable and DSL model termination system. They built an appliance to do this. They put together the hardware and wrote a ton of software to make it all work. In the late 90s, they chose Java inside this appliance. This was on the leading edge in terms of what Java is capable of. They had a really nice outcome by selling it to Redback.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Andrus Oks, Founding Partner of Tera Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The other advantage you have is, there is a substantial enterprise software buyer market in Europe as well. The Indian buyer market is not as mature. Europe has lots of large enterprises that buy a lot of technology. You could build a substantial business catering to European enterprise customers. That’s one observation.

The second one is that language is an issue in Europe more than in India. In India, the business operates mostly in English. There’s a bit more of a language issue in Europe. English is, not necessarily, the lingua franca of Europe. In your region, English is more of the lingua franca.