563rd Roundtable For Entrepreneurs Starting In 30 Minutes: Live Tweeting By @1Mby1M

Today’s 563rd FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, February 10, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. CLICK HERE to join. PASSWORD: startup  All are welcome!

Featured Videos

Cloud Stocks: Analysis of GoDaddy’s Pagely Acquisition

Internet domain provider GoDaddy (NYSE: GDDY) delivered another strong quarter. The company continues to acquire other players to expand its product offerings. It is also focusing on payment services for its portfolio of customers.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Sonny Tai, CEO of Actuate AI (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Technology-wise, you told me the story of winning one competitor and replacing them. What does the competitive landscape look like?

Sonny Tai: We never lose when we’re given a fair shake. What I mean by that is, if a customer does a pilot with us and tests our technology in earnest, we have never lost a deal. We’ve had customers where they deprioritize this initiative. There’s nothing we can do about that.

Video FAQs

Cloud Stocks: Bill.com Continues Focus on Services for the SMB Segment

I have been impressed with how invoicing solutions provider Bill.com (NYSE:BILL) has been quietly scaling its operations. I rank Bill.com as one of the top 25 cloud stocks to invest in 2022. Its recent result announcements have reaffirmed my faith in the company.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Muddu Sudhakar, CEO of Aisera (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about this last use case where you take over the screen of the user and fix problems. How well-deployed is that?

Muddu Sudhakar: All of our customers are using that today. We now have 75 million users worldwide.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers is that?

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Sonny Tai, CEO of Actuate AI (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about the first customer? Was that a managed service provider or was it an end-user?

Sonny Tai: The first customer was an end-user. Our first employee attended a private school in Chicago called Francis Parker School. They’re very forward-thinking about how they want to deploy security technology to help protect their students. This school was our first customer. We started working with them on a pilot basis in mid-2018.

Cloud Stocks: Amazon to Test Prime Customer Stickiness

Earlier last week, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced its fourth-quarter results that had mixed reactions. While it fell marginally short of revenue expectations, it reported a significant increase in income, thus gaining the market’s confidence. For the longest time, Amazon decoupled growth and profitability, and the market went along with that sentiment. It is nice to see profitability returning to being a consideration.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped with Services, Raised Money, and then Acquired by Salesforce

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

John Stewart and his co-founder have built MapAnything from Charlotte, North Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia. When we spoke in 2018, he had raised over $40 million in funding, proving that you can build sizable VC-funded SaaS businesses from anywhere. MapAnything was sold to Salesforce in May 2019.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where did you grow up? Give us some early story.

John Stewart: I’m from upstate New York. I’m from a middle class background. My mother was a stay-at-home mom. My father was in the construction business. He was an architect. I went to school in New England for Mechanical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in western Massachusetts and graduated in 1997.

>>>