Sramana Mitra: I’ll give you a bit of my comment. We see a lot of investors and we see a lot of entrepreneurs and their needs. One thing that I really like about what you’re saying is there’s a tremendous bias in the industry against solo entrepreneurs. The truth is a vast majority of entrepreneurs start solo. Along the way, they build teams and products. Even the founder of ServiceNow started as a solo entrepreneur.
I don’t believe that solo entrepreneurship doesn’t work. Of course, you have to bring in all the skills and resources around you, but you can do it step by step. The fact that you are open to working with solo entrepreneurs and building the team around them is actually a very interesting angle.
>>>Sramana Mitra: When you launched on the app store while you were in YC, what was the regulatory status? Did you go through all these individual state-wise regulatory approval processes for all of them?
Carl Memnon: One of the learnings that came out of Arizona was that we don’t need to be the lender on record. In order to get a financial institution to deploy this technology, we needed to get to that point of maturity in terms of the product.
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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 586th FREE online 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable on Thursday, August 18, 2022, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST.
If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea. You’ll receive straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and answers to any of your questions. Others can register to “attend” to watch, learn, and interact through the online chat.
You can learn more here and REGISTER TO PITCH OR ATTEND HERE. Register and you will receive the recording by email, even if you are unable to attend. Please share with any entrepreneurs in your circle who may be interested. All are welcome!
Sramana Mitra: You said you invest mostly in enterprise software. Can you elaborate more about what is your enterprise software investment thesis? Let’s talk about your enterprise software strategy.
Cameron Kramlich: Our core strategy has to do with the shape of our team. Our deepest background is in software. Software is quite complicated. You have everything from platform plays to applications. When you look at our team, we have a whole bunch of experts that are part of companies of all sizes. We’ll look at a company that needs a good CMO. We’ll take a public company CMO who’s looking for a new project for a couple of months. We’ll put him in that job. We get a company that needs a CTO or an engineer.
>>>In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:
Sramana Mitra: After you graduated from Arizona, were you successful in raising funding?
Carl Memnon: Absolutely. We spent a lot of time on the product itself and taking the learnings from that program and implementing it into the product. I wouldn’t necessarily say that the sandbox itself was the thing that allowed us to raise money in the same way that YC will help facilitate raising money. What it did do is it allowed us to get the company in a position where we could raise money.
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During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Mohanjit Jolly, Partner at Iron Pillar, and a long time player in the Indian startup ecosystem. Among other topics, we had an interesting discussion about Exit options for Indian startups.
Interamplify
As for our entrepreneur pitch, we first had Natalia Aldama from Mucia, Spain, pitching interamplify, an SEO service.
You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.
Kevin Groome, Founder of Pica9, had done an excellent job of bootstrapping his tech company without a tech background when we spoke in 2019. Inspiring story for many in his shoes.
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?
Kevin Groome: I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. I went to school there. I had the good fortune, in those early years, to be around a bunch of people who weren’t famous at that time but went on to be very famous. I went to History class with Jeff Bezos. I went to English Literature class with Michelle Obama, and I even went to acting class with Brooke Shields.