Will Investors Fund Your Startup?

Investors generally do not fund businesses unless they have some level of validation, customers, and traction. You most likely will need to bootstrap your way to a point where investors would be interested. Please take a look at our free course on Bootstrapping to get a taste of how we teach at One Million by One Million (1Mby1M). You may also check out some of our Udemy courses to get a feel.

Interested in getting some help with validating your startup? Apply to win a one-year scholarship to the 1Mby1M Premium program, sponsored by DataStax, valued at $1000.

Featured Videos

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping Lessons Learned by FairWarning Founder Kurt Long

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

FairWarning Founder Kurt Long has tried different permutations and combinations of bootstrapping, several of them successfully. Listen to his perspective on each of those from when we spoke in 2015. FairWarning was acquired by Imprivata in 2018

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Kurt Long: I was raised in Clearwater, Florida. I grew up in Florida at a very special time where we enjoyed being outside and in the waters. As I grew up, I watched the Apollo missions and other NASA-based missions take off from the Kennedy Space Center, which is on the other coast but you could still see the launches. From a very early age, those made an impression on me that I wanted to participate in innovation and exploration. That’s something that has stayed with me through my whole career. As I went through high school and college, I held on to the dream and even wrote letters to Kennedy Space Center to ask about the Space Center and how it worked.

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1Mby1M Startup EnCloudEn Acquired by Quantum Corporation

Congratulations to EnCloudEn Co-founder Abinash Saikia and the entire EnCloudEn team! Quantum Corporation (NASDAQ: QMCO) acquired EnCloudEn, an early stage hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software company. The co-founders mostly bootstrapped the company with very small capital, so this is effectively a bootstrapping to exit deal.

“I joined the 1Mby1M Premium program in 2020 and had a very good experience interacting with Sramana,” shares EnCloudEn Co-founder Abinash Saikia. “Her inputs during the private roundtable sessions added a lot of value; she addressed the exact objectives I had. She also made a number of valuable introductions. Overall, the program had a very positive influence on our journey.”

The EnCloudEn acquisition will enable Quantum to expand the addressable market for the company’s video surveillance portfolio, offering customers a solution using their server hardware of choice with a flexible subscription-based software model. EnCloudEn’s approach to simplicity and automation integrates tightly with Quantum’s strategy to offer customers intuitive end-to-end solutions for the video data lifecycle.

Video FAQs

10 Udemy Courses on How to Build a Product Startup Using Services

This Udemy bundle is for IT and IT-enabled businesses wanting to understand how to get early clients by providing services, as well as existing IT-service companies looking to transition into product businesses.

Why is this set of skills so important?

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Prashant Kumar, CTO of Cardinality (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: C3.ai is exactly like yours. They have a core platform. They’ve gone after the energy market first. They have relationships with the system integrators. Now they’re broadening. It’s a very similar strategy. There’s another company that I’m tracking that has a similar strategy. They come from an open source route which is H20 AI. 

Prashant Kumar: The challenge is that a lot of people are developing point solutions. We focus on what we call a data journey. Your data journey could be data engineering, machine learning, or visualization. C3.ai has an amazing platform. They’ve gone public as well. They’re focused on the machine learning side of things. H20 AI is sitting in a different segment. We don’t play in that space. We integrate with H20 AI. We’re super clear that we’re a data journey platform.

Analysis of Affirm’s Returnly Acquisition

The global Buy Now, Pay Later market is expected to grow at 22% CAGR to $20.4 billion by 2028 driven by the improvements in platforms, such as convenient and interest-free payments especially when shopping online. Affirm (NASDAQ: AFRM) is a leading player in the market that went public early this year.

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ohad Maislish, CEO of env0 (Part 1)

Ohad talks about trends and open problems within the DevOps space. This is a deeply technical conversation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to env0.

Catching Up On Readings: VC Funding Q3 2021

This report from Crunchbase News analyzes the trends in global venture funding, which hit a peak of $160 billion in the third quarter of 2021. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.