Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping Using Services to $26M and a Fabulous Exit

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

Founder CEO Vamsi Kora has bootstrapped Gathi Analytics to over $26 million in revenue in four years and exited at a fabulous multiple. Much to learn from his journey.

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?

Vamsi Kora: I’m from south India, from a village in Rajamundry, which is very close to the Bay of Bengal. I did Mechanical Engineering. Right after it, I went to have one of the very few well-paid careers at that time. I couldn’t afford to come to the US. So I went into merchant shipping and roamed around the world for about three years. I made two and half rounds around the equator.

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Sramana Mitra: What was the skillset of that employee that you brought in?

Peter Ord: He was a fellow sales leader. I was supporting the product.

Sramana Mitra: The agency that you were working with was maintaining the product.

Peter Ord: Right. We were selling and getting more customers. Todd, who was that first employee, came to me and said, “I don’t have the time to support this. I can’t handle these calls. We need to find an operations person.” That’s when I hired my third employee in December of 2018. He’s won CEO of the Year from Silicon Slopes in Utah.

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Christopher Mirabile: Asset prices are stupid right now. That’s difficult because doing the kind of investing you and I do, you have to be disciplined about price and about staging capital. Those are difficult circumstances. I feel like there’s a lot of hype about crypto. We’re not paying much attention to that. I’m sure that’s going to be an important technology down the road, but that’s not the focus for us.

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Sramana Mitra: To be able to get to $20 million with $1.4 million, you have to bootstrap. That’s something we believe in and promote extensively. We are with you on this line of thinking. Like you said, these large funds can only invest large amounts of money. Otherwise, their human capital-to-capital ratio doesn’t work out.

Christopher Mirabile: They just can’t manage that many deals. It’s interesting. You read about large exits all the time. You think they grow on trees. There are a couple of dozen billion-dollar startup exits at most from 400,000 to 500,000 startups created in the US each year. Pushing an entrepreneur to a high-capital, big exit path is, statistically speaking, dooming him to failure.

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