Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Paresh Patel: We started to prepare the company for scale. We had just received our Series A. We got $12 million in the bank. I first hired a COO and then a CFO. We opened up a new office. We messed up. We hired too fast and too big. Too many positions that didn’t really need to be hired for yet.

Sramana Mitra: Series A is more about how to build the product and how to sell the product.

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Building a Mid-Market Cyber Security Company from Utah: Peter Bookman, CEO of Guard Dog (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s come back to your story. Did Fusion-io go public?

Peter Bookman: It did. It was relatively smooth. A year and a half later, I left to start a virtual desktop company. That transacted again to another storage company Sandisk. I love listening to and solving a real problem. Whether we look at virtual private networks that are very prolific and common today as well as storage, they’re not in all of the cloud.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after you left?

559th Roundtable For Entrepreneurs Starting NOW: Live Tweeting By @1Mby1M

Today’s 559th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, January 13, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click HERE to join. PASSWORD: startup  All are welcome!

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559th Roundtable For Entrepreneurs Starting In 30 Minutes: Live Tweeting By @1Mby1M

Today’s 559th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, January 13, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click HERE to join. PASSWORD: startup  All are welcome!

Indian Unicorns 2022: Meesho Delivers Social Commerce Solutions

India’s social commerce market is expected to grow to $20 billion by 2025, up from $1-$1.5 billion in 2020. Analysts believe that social commerce can help connect more than 40 million small entrepreneurs across India. 85% of retailers using social commerce are small, offline-oriented business owners who are looking up to social commerce to drive their growth. Social commerce startup Meesho recently raised funding at a valuation of $4.9 billion.

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later from Oregon: Paresh Patel, CEO of PayRange (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The form factor of your product was that you would just clip it on a retail machine?

Paresh Patel: The design was remarkably simple. It almost works like a thumb drive. You just take the device and plug it into the machine. In three seconds, it could take that legacy machine and convert it into a modern mobile machine.

Sramana Mitra: A million and a half worth of orders were from how many customers?‘

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped from Belarus, Raised Money from Silicon Valley

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

As you know, I love stories of entrepreneurs in different parts of the world finding success through grit and creativity. PandaDoc CEO Mikita Mikado’s story gives us an insight into what’s happening in Belarus, and how he has navigated his way to Silicon Valley. Based on this conversation from 2017, our Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later mantra holds!

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

Mikita Mikado: I’m from Belarus, which is a small, former Soviet Union state on the western border of Russia. I was born in 1986. That’s about the time when things went down. My journey began there. I went to a normal Belarusian school. I was a typical Belarusian kid at that time.

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Building a Mid-Market Cyber Security Company from Utah: Peter Bookman, CEO of Guard Dog (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In your case, the fact that you had a successful exit was helpful. Repeat founders always have an easier time raising money.

Peter Bookman: It does not hurt when your story can begin with, “I had a good horse and a good jockey. We won the race.” It does something else. You tend not to be alarmed, and you tend to be quite patient. It is fascinating that we got funding during that crisis.