Roundtable Recap: March 5 – Billion Dollar Unicorns with Ratmir Timashev, CEO of Veeam

During today’s roundtable, we celebrated the launch of my book, Billion Dollar Unicorns, with Ratmir Timashev, CEO of Veeam. Veeam is Ratmir’s second venture, so he had some money to bootstrap with. Consequently, Veeam avoided taking any venture capital and grew organically till about $200 million in revenue. Today, Ratmir has taken some money from

Read Full Article »

Featured Videos

Billion Dollar Unicorns: Strategies From 5 Entrepreneurs

You have already read my recent piece, Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, as one of the tried and true approaches to building Unicorn companies. In this piece, I want to share with you some other strategies worth looking at as well, as part of our Billion Dollar Unicorns exploration. Each of these has a video

Read Full Article »

Roundtable Recap: February 26 – Billion Dollar Unicorns with Scott Sandell, NEA

During today’s roundtable, we celebrated both our milestone 250th roundtable, as well as the launch of my book, Billion Dollar Unicorns, with Scott Sandell, General Partner, NEA. Among Silicon Valley’s venture firms, NEA holds a special place in my own entrepreneurial journey, being the first VC firm that I successfully raised funding from. Oddly, and

Read Full Article »

Billion Dollar Unicorns: What Have You Learned?

As part of our continued coverage of the Billion Dollar Unicorns, I’d to like to create a space on this blog to welcome analysis and observations from entrepreneurs who have built Unicorn businesses, as well as investors who have supported these entrepreneurs on their remarkable journeys. Over the last 10 years of this blog, we

Read Full Article »

Billion Dollar Unicorns: Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later

I have started 2015 with the launch of a new book called Billion Dollar Unicorns. Writing this book took me through the extensive process of talking to entrepreneurs who have built tech companies with valuations above a billion dollars. While there is a tremendous amount of serendipity involved in any extraordinary success story, one recurring

Read Full Article »

Roundtable Recap: February 12 – Billion Dollar Unicorns with Ross Mason, Founder of Mulesoft

During today’s roundtable, we celebrated the launch of my new book, Billion Dollar Unicorns, with Ross Mason, founder of Mulesoft, as our guest. Ross has built a terrific commercial Open Source company that is scaling at Unicorn rates, with freemium conversion rates in the 5-6% range. Ross discusses how he got the company off the

Read Full Article »

Billion Dollar Unicorns: Cloud Investment Thesis of 5 VCs

Last fall, we had five VCs participate in our 1M/1M roundtables to discuss their Cloud Computing investment thesis. These interviews cover as well as build upon the themes discussed in my two recent books, Billion Dollar Unicorns and Carnival In The Cloud. If you are looking to build a Unicorn company in the Cloud Computing domain, I strongly recommend you

Read Full Article »

Billion Dollar Unicorns: Web 3.0 and E-Commerce Investment Thesis of 3 VCs

Last fall, we had three VCs participate in our 1M/1M roundtables to discuss their Web 3.0 and e-Commerce investment thesis. These interviews cover as well as build upon the themes discussed in my two recent books, Billion Dollar Unicorns and From E-Commerce to Web 3.0. If you are looking to build a Unicorn company in the

Read Full Article »