Solo Entrepreneur Focused on Autonomy as Key Success Driver: Hank Luhring, Founder of IssueTrak (Part 1)

Hank tells the story of a solo entrepreneur who bootstrapped his product startup with services over a longer, slower period, while maintaining a high quality lifestyle. Success is personal. Autonomy and quality of life matter more to certain entrepreneurs than the flawed “Go Big and Go Home” mantra that VCs preach.

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?

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Catching Up On Readings: Top 10 AI Startups 2021

This report from CRN looks at the top 10 AI startups in 2021 and says that the global AI market grew 15.2% to $341.8 billion. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Krish Ramineni, CEO of Fireflies.ai (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In building your company, I’d like to understand how you sell. You’re getting leads through different parts of the company, but who buys your product? Is it Head of HR or Head of IT?

Krish Ramineni: Our model is 100% self-service. It could be an individual swiping their card to pay or it could be a team manager. If the department really likes it, their procurement or Head of IT will purchase. We sell to customers the way they want to purchase.

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10 Udemy Courses on How to Build a Startup by Piggybacking on a Platform

One of the most exciting trends in the tech industry currently is Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Developer Ecosystems. Entrepreneurs looking for a capital-efficient strategy should seriously consider bootstrapping by piggybacking on these PaaS players.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Krish Ramineni, CEO of Fireflies.ai (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Are you going after enterprises or SMBs? How do you go to market?

Krish Ramineni: It’s a very blended mix. It’s a very interesting challenge and opportunity with product-led growth. Fireflies can be used by one-person SMBs as well as 10,000-strong organizations. Typically, it starts with that one user inside an organization who shows is to the team. We have this bottom-up adoption. What’s that led to is folks reaching out saying, “I’m seeing a bunch of my teammates using this. I would love to learn more. I want to see how we can deploy it for the team.”

Colors: Solitude I

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 – Solitude I

Solitude I | Sramana Mitra, 2020 | Watercolor | 18  x 24, On Paper

Cloud Stocks: C3.ai Expands Enterprise and Public Sector Presence

The global Artificial Intelligence (AI) market is expected to grow at 40% CAGR from $62.35 billion in 2020 through to 2028. Tom Siebel’s C3.ai (NYSE: AI) Is making big inroads in this market through partnerships and product innovation.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Krish Ramineni, CEO of Fireflies.ai (Part 1)

Krish discusses how he used completely organic go-to-market strategies to disseminate an AI-intelligent note-taking assistant product.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you as well as to Fireflies.

Krish Ramineni: The journey goes back a couple of years. When we started Fireflies, our mission was different. We were solving the same problem in the AI space, which was around understanding conversations and deriving meaning from those conversations. The platforms that we were doing this on were different. Today, Fireflies is an AI meeting assistant that joins meetings and transcribes it, generating notes and summaries.