Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping Linguamatics to Over $10M from the UK

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

Cambridge, England is a great place for high-end technical talent. This story from 2017 traces the journey of a group of such talented people with core expertise in Natural Language Processing, including Co-founder Roger Hale, and how they turned their expertise into a robust, profitable business.

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

Roger Hale: I think I had quite a normal upbringing. I grew up in Yorkshire in the northeast of England. My mother came from a family with a local manufacturing business. She also ran a restaurant for a while. My father was an academic. He was a mathematician. He had actually been a code breaker and worked with some of the very first computers as part of that. I didn’t obviously know that until later.

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Bootstrapping Using Facebook Ads to $5M: Dow Janes Co-founders Laurie-Anne King and Britt Baker (Part 1)

Facebook gets a tremendous bad rap for its many nefarious side effects. Numerous small businesses, however, have been possible because of Facebook’s incredible Ad engine.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What is the story leading up to this? We’ll do Laurie-Anne as well in that mode.

20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch to the other side of the business. What go-to-market strategy did you go with that?

Scott Sellers: The product is called Platform Prime. It is based on open source technology. It’s the same OpenJDK that the open-source Zulu comes from. To that, we add proprietary elements that make it better. It makes it faster, scalable, and easier to deploy in clouds. We’ve deployed a traditional enterprise go-to-market for that.

Video FAQs

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Steve Eskenazi, Angel Investor (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I was talking to Eric Benhamou two days ago. He was like, “I’m looking for a good application or use case for NFT.” What about exits? What have you seen through your investments?

Steve Eskenazi: I think there are a couple of tried and true methodologies. I think the best company gets bought and not sold. You have to build companies the right way and you have to scale them the right way. Throwing money at problems is not a solution.

Catching Up On Readings: State of Web3

This feature from The Wall Street Journal by Christopher Mims decodes the status of Web3 following the crash of the world’s crypto prices. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Colors: Printemps III

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 – Printemps III

Printemps III | Sramana Mitra, 2020 | Watercolor, Pastel, Brush Pen | 9  x 12, On Paper

20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: The open-source was a commercial open source business model where the free product was lead generating for a subscription-based offering?

Scott Sellers: Right. We still have free downloads of the open-source software. We encourage people to use it in an unrestricted manner. The business monetization model is selling commercial support services, which include the obvious thing of answering the phones. More importantly, it’s things like timely security updates and long-term access to builds.

Colors: Printemps II

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 – Printemps II

Printemps II | Sramana Mitra, 2020 | Watercolor, Pastel, Brush Pen | 9  x 12, On Paper