From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You’re giving a lot of automotive examples. Is that one of the areas where you entered the market?

Slava Bronfman: Yes, we wanted to start with one segment that we can really understand well. We started with automotive. Today, we are in other segments like medical devices and industrial IoT. When we started, we were laser-focused on the automotive segment.

Sramana Mitra: When you were designing the product, did you have a design partner?

Featured Videos

IPOs 2021: Wise Aspires to Minimize Cross Currency Transaction Fees

The Global Digital Remittance Market is projected to grow at 13% CAGR to reach $40.26 billion by 2028 from $15.94 billion in 2020. Digital transformation is helping drive growth in the industry as institutions are able to provide improved products and services while minimizing user costs. London-based Wise (LSE:L) is a leading FinTech player in the market that recently went public.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the revenue trajectory with search engine and affiliate marketing as the drivers?

Josh Chodniewicz: The other consumer driver for us was our partnership with eBay in 1998 to list our products. We were talking to eBay about why their marketplace didn’t have the traction. The problem was their listing fee. They were charging a 10-cent listing fee.

Video FAQs

From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: By December, you had the MVP. How many of the other customers came on board?

Slava Bronfman: Just a handful in the first quarter of 2017.

Sramana Mitra: What was the incident to make you realize that you had to pivot?

IPOs 2021: Analysis of GitLab’s Opstrace Acquisition

According to a recent report, the global DevOps Platform market is projected to grow 20% from $6.7 billion in 2021 to $26.37 billion by 2028. GitLab (Nasdaq:GTLB) is a leading provider of DevOps solution in the market that recently went public.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Why Art.com?

Josh Chodniewicz: This was in 1994. It was a while ago. A buddy of mine called me up. He was at Virginia Tech. He was getting his Computer Science degree there. He said, “Josh, I know something that’s going to be huge one day – the internet.” We started talking about it.

I bought myself a modem and started playing around with it. We brainstormed in a diner in New Jersey. Nobody was using it. To give context, one out of 800 Americans had an email address in 1994.

From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve finished this accelerator program and you’ve got some mentors. What was your trajectory? Were you building a product first? Were you talking to customers? Where did the validation of your idea come from?

Slava Bronfman: We were a bit naive. We just started building the product. Our product is very tech-heavy. We were thinking that two guys can just build the product. We understood that it’s not the case. The right thing to do is to build a nice presentation and approach investors. We had a big mission here and we needed a lot of people to build the product.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz (Part 1)

Josh bootstrapped for 10 years before raising a $30M first round of funding.

Read on to learn more about his journey.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raise, and in what kind of background?