Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: QuillBot CEO Rohan Gupta (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. What is the trajectory of your company? How did you get started? Where does the AI expertise come from?

Rohan Gupta: It’s a stereotypical startup story. My co-founders and I were in school. My co-founder, the CTO, is a college dropout. My third co-founder was one year out of school and he quit his full-time job. We started with a Google Translate interface. It just took off. We started seeing a ton of organic traffic. It motivated us to pursue it full-time.

Featured Videos

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sandeep Sardana, Founder and General Partner at BluePointe Ventures (Part 1)

Sandeep Sardana is Founder and General Partner at BluePointe Ventures. We had a terrific discussion on how we each look for a startup story through financial metrics.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing yourself to our audience. Tell us a bit about your journey. What path brings you here?

Best of Bootstrapping: RJMetrics Co-founders Bootstrapped First, Raised $22M Later

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

Here is yet another story of a high-growth SaaS company that was bootstrapped first. When I spoke with RJMetrics Co-founder Robert Moore in 2016, the company had gone on to raise $22 million. RJMetrics was acquired by Magento and is now part of Adobe Commerce Cloud.

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

Robert Moore: I was born in Annapolis, Maryland but actually grew up and spent the majority of my childhood in a town called Glassboro, New Jersey, which is in southern New Jersey. My journey really begins in high school where I started my first business and really fell in love with entrepreneurship. Everything grew out of that.

>>>

Video FAQs

6 Udemy Courses on How To Build an Online Fashion Startup

I started one of the Internet’s first fashion e-commerce companies in 1999. It was very expensive to do so at the time.

Today, an online fashion business can be launched in an extraordinarily capital-efficient manner. 

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: QuillBot CEO Rohan Gupta (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. I have had a blog for 17 years. I’m always a bit annoyed by the rubbish that gets produced out there.

Rohan Gupta: I am too. As a company that started content marketing, we need to eat our own dog food and produce content in a very thoughtful way.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a funny industry. Recently, we started working with Udemy. We have thousands of hours of entrepreneurship curriculum. We started packaging these into Udemy courses. We’ve released 30 courses on Udemy.

12 Udemy Courses for Tech Founders without Business Background

You may be a brilliant computer scientist or even a genius. To become a successful entrepreneur, though, you must not only know how to code but also understand the fundamentals of launching and growing a business.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: QuillBot CEO Rohan Gupta (Part 1)

Rohan discusses AI-empowered writing as an emerging field. The company has 12 million users and has recently been acquired by Course Hero.

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

Bootstrapping to Exit, Then do a VC-Funded Venture: Cordial CEO Jeremy Swift (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Once you had the Series A, what was the next major inflection point? What strategic moves did you make to get to that?

Jeremy Swift: I would say it was about just further refinement of what our ICP was and figuring out go-to-market too. That was a hard thing to navigate. It took us years to figure out. Just because you raise venture capital, it doesn’t immediately change those things for you. There’s still a lot of hard work.