Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) recently announced its fourth-quarter financials that sent its stock plummeting. The company suffered its biggest one-day wipeout ever with its stock sliding 26%, wiping out more than $230 billion of its market value. The company actually reported the first-ever user decline in 18 years, causing the big upheaval. Also, Apple has tightened the privacy screws on Facebook, taking away serious targeting capabilities. Most likely, a lot more grief is on the way for the company as EU privacy rules also start to kick in gear on privacy issues.
>>>Aisera is doing some incredibly advanced stuff with AI-driven workflow automation within the customer service space.
Muddu talks eloquently about these innovations. Read on!
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Aisera.
>>>Sonny talks about AI in the physical security industry.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as to Actuate AI.
Sonny Tai: I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of Actuate. We are a New York-based AI startup. I was born in Taiwan, but I grew up in South Africa. I’m an immigrant to the United States.
>>>Deepak Balakrishna, Co-founder CEO of Adya, which was acquired by Qualys. We review his lessons from the trenches, steering a Bootstrapping to Exit transaction.
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Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise in the second round?
Jonny Grubin: Probably about £300,000. In total, we raised about £900,000.
Sramana Mitra: Excellent. I love capital-efficient businesses.
>>>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 – Purple Blossoms
Purple Blossoms | Sramana Mitra, 2020 | Watercolor | 9 x 12, On Paper
Sramana Mitra: 2014 and 2015, more of the same?
Jonny Grubin: Our focus and what I had built this business around was gifting samples to a friend. We were doing well with that. There was nobody else in the space. Brands loved it. We were on a pretty exciting trajectory. We had a lot of brands come to us saying, “We want to be able to sample in other ways. We don’t do it through just a gifting experience.” It was only down to my stubbornness that we focused solely on gifting for so long.
>>>In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: