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 – Blue Field, Green Woods
Blue Field, Green Woods | Sramana Mitra, 2020 | Watercolor | 9 x 12, On Paper
Sramana Mitra: You have a wonderful positioning because anything that has a compliance angle to it has a very mission-critical purchase cycle. You must have experienced pretty high-velocity customer building.
Sarva Srinivasan: That’s correct. In parallel, we started building EZOPS. As part of our engagement, we were talking with the clients and their challenges. Oftentimes, it was just a lack of an end-to-end platform. It could be that I have the wrong data. Therefore, I’m not able to send the right information to the regulators. It could be that I have 10 different applications sending the same data and I can’t figure out what the right data is. These are very simple problems.
>>>Lloyed Lobo: R&D tax credit is a beachhead for us. My co-founder used to run this at KPMG. He was a manager at the R&D tax credit team. He said that it’s a manual and broken process. At the end of the year, we would go to companies and say, “Give us your shoebox.” But that shoebox is not just your receipts; it’s everything you did in R&D.
>>>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 – Blue Field, Black Mountain
Blue Field, Black Mountain | Sramana Mitra, 2020 | Watercolor | 9 x 12, On Paper
Sramana Mitra: You were doing this out of Chicago?
Sarva Srinivasan: New Jersey. All three of us are from New Jersey. We started off in a small office back in January 2014.
Sramana Mitra: All these 20 clients, you serviced with just the three of you?
>>>If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.
When we spoke in 2015, Joel Lessem was scaling a profitable company in Toronto called Firmex, and had only spent $4 million in angel money to get to almost $10 million in revenue.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
Joel Lessem: I was born in Israel but raised in Toronto from the age of three. I grew up in Toronto.
Entrepreneurs are invited to the 552nd FREE online 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable on Thursday, November 4, 2021, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST.
If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea. You’ll receive straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and answers to any of your questions. Others can register to “attend” to watch, learn, and interact through the online chat.
You can learn more here and register to pitch or attend here.
During this roundtable program, Sramana Mitra will be hosting a Workshop on How to Build Communities of Entrepreneurs EVERYWHERE. Following the workshop, we will hold our usual entrepreneur pitch session.
Register and you will receive the recording by email, even if you are unable to attend. Please share with any entrepreneurs in your circle who may be interested. All are welcome!
Lloyed Lobo, Co-founder and President of Boast.ai, discusses his failures and eventual success building AI startups. Wonderful conversation!
Sramana Mitra: Welcome Lloyed. I’m looking forward to know you and understanding what you’re doing.
Lloyed Lobo: Thanks for having me.
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