Best of Bootstrapping: The Entrepreneur – VC Compensation Disbalance

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

The compensation disbalance in the Venture Capital / Private Equity world remains quite stark. Take a look at the chart a friend once sent me showing some concrete data on VC compensation, and Private Equity industry performance.

VCs without much of an operating background constitute a trigger-happy lot, operating based on spreadsheets rather than experience or intuition. Of course there are exceptions, and VCs like John Doerr and Mike Moritz have created enormous value, and have effectively helped build the ecosystem as we know it today. Nonetheless, the few rounds of Silicon Valley Gold Rushes have made it possible for opportunists who have also managed to flourish.

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Featured Videos

Roundtable Recap: May 19 – Examples of What Works and Doesn’t in Investor Pitches

During this week’s roundtable, we had four pitches from entrepreneurs from around the world.

Includovate

As for entrepreneur pitches, we had Kristie Drucza from Kampala, Uganda, pitch Includovate, an inclusive R&D services company with $1M+ in revenues looking to pivot.

Keepler

Next we had Rachel Abramowitz from Brooklyn, New York, pitch Keepler, a next generation, thoughtful dating app.

Project Blue-Treasures

Then Mohammad Hussain from Bogota, Colombia, pitched Project Blue-Treasures, an ocean-driven beauty product e-commerce venture.

Light Pong

And next, Aaqib Usman from Chicago, Illinois, pitched Light Pong, a new game that already has some traction on Kickstarter.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Elisity CEO James Winebrenner (Part 5)

James Winebrenner: The second thing is not going at it alone. All of these companies that we want to do business with can’t evaluate tens of thousands of vendors. The space changes rapidly. Much more so in security. Some of these segments are so small when they start.

Video FAQs

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Praava Health CEO Sylvana Sinha, Bangladesh (Part 1)

We love pioneering entrepreneurs. Sylvana is working on upgrading the healthcare system in Bangladesh. Wonderful, inspiring story!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some background about your own journey. How did you get going with Praava Health?

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Elisity CEO James Winebrenner (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Healthcare and manufacturing are two big segments where you are doing a lot of work.

James Winebrenner: Yes, we are starting to see acknowledgment of this need in traditional enterprise space. I met with a large investment bank in New York last week that has done micro-segmentation initiatives in their data centers, but they’re now moving back out into their campuses and looking at user segmentation and device segmentation in those environments. These are networks where we think about iPads and laptops, but we see everything from Peloton to process controllers. It’s becoming more of a challenge.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping a Virtual Company with a Paycheck

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

Cedric’s story is a textbook case study of the kind of entrepreneur we want to see emerge and grow in every corner of the world: a solo entrepreneur who is a developer and a product guy capable of getting to validation while holding onto a day job. When we spoke in 2019, FormAssembly Founder and CEO Cedric Savarese had almost 50 employees spread around the world, and while it maintained a small office of fewer than 10 people in Indiana, the bulk of the company had scaled as a virtual workforce. Excellent model, and I encourage aspiring entrepreneurs to read this carefully.

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?

Cedric Savarese: I was born in France and expatriated to the US. I grew up in a small town not so far from Paris.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clickatell CEO Pieter de Villiers from South Africa (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is telecom the largest category in which you’re doing chat commerce?

Pieter de Villiers: Telecom is the largest category where we see high-volume adoption of chat commerce. However, we believe that financial services will eclipse that very soon.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of financial services?

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Elisity CEO James Winebrenner (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Your primary insight is that you had the technical background, but you spent time building up sales and business model experience before you took the leap into entrepreneurship.

James Winebrenner: Yes.