Non-Technical Founder Scaling SaaS Venture to Exit: Velocify Founder Jeff Solomon (Part 1)

Jeff is an English major who successfully bootstrapped a SaaS company with Services. The company eventually exited at a $130M valuation. Wonderful perspective from a non-technical founder on building a tech startup to success.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning and introduce yourself and Velocify to our audience.

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Non-Technical Founder Building a Tech Startup to over $10M: David Moricca, CEO of Socialive (Part 1)

We very often get questions on whether non-technical founders can build tech companies. David’s story is a really interesting one that touches many aspects of the 1Mby1M methodology.

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

Catching Up On Readings: AI Market 2022

Gartner forecasts the AI software market will grow 21.3% to $62.5 billion in 2022 and that the top five use case categories for AI software spending in 2022 will be knowledge management, virtual assistants, autonomous vehicles, digital workplace, and crowdsourced data. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Video FAQs

Bootstrapping an Artificial Intelligence Startup with Services: Nitesh Chawla, Founder, Aunalytics (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That’s still a horizontal issue though. Connectors are still horizontal plumbing. There are a finite set of data warehouse that you need to connect to. As long as you have those, you are good. Where is the vertical logic coming from?

Nitesh Chawla: Then we got through mapping workshops. We sit down with the business person and go through the process of understanding the business question, looking at the data, and doing some validation. We conduct workshops. We have deep domain knowledge of the banking sector now. I was always convinced it’s a collaboration. It’s an immersion process. Then we bring in that vertical knowledge into our technology layer.

555th Roundtable Recording with Seksom Suriyapa, Upfront Ventures

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

Roundtable Recap: December 2 – More on Exit Strategy

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Seksom Suriyapa, Partner at Upfront Ventures, and formerly head of Corp Dev at Twitter, SuccessFactors, McAfee and Akamai. Seksom discussed exit strategy from the buy-side perspective at length.

OneNDF

As for entrepreneur pitches, up first we had 1Mby1M Premium member Nitin Khandelwal from New Delhi, India, pitching OneNDF. It was more a working session on his financial and fund-raising strategy.

ExtraSlice

Next, we had Binu Reghunathan from Bellevue, Washington, pitch ExtraSlice, a commercial real-estate marketplace that is taking advantage of the work-from-home trend and the desire for flexibility in office space.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping Edge Hosting to $18 Million

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

Vlad Friedman, CEO of Edge Hosting, had built his business using only bank financing when we spoke in 2016. Read how he did it and learn more about non-dilutive financing mechanisms.

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?

Vlad Friedman: I was originally born in Ukraine back in 1973. In 1979, my family decided to immigrate to the United States. I came to Baltimore, Maryland at the age of six from Kiev. My family and I have lived here ever since.

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Solo Student Entrepreneur to Over $50M Revenue: Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Why do you need 300 people? The demand meant bigger server investment. Where does the people angle come in?

Erik Allebest: We take our customer support very seriously. We believe that taking care of our community is a big deal. When you have five times as many active users, you need five times as many support agents. We scaled up our support team significantly. Also, we’ve been adding to our international team significantly. The amount of content and translations require larger teams to translate and take care of all of the international growth.