Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Salil and Kiran Pande, Co-Founders of VMock (Part 1)

Salil and Kiran Pande have built a capital-efficient AI company from India addressing the global career services market.

It’s a wonderful conversation that works in both AI thought leadership and also their entrepreneurial journey. Enjoy!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself, your co-founder, and VMock.

Featured Videos

Best of Bootstrapping: Wrike Founder Bootstrapped First, Raised Money Later

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

Wrike Founder Andrew Filev has built a company with a rigorous data-driven approach. Learn how from our conversation in 2015.

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?

Andrew Filev: I was born in St. Petersburg in Russia. I got interested in computers pretty early. I spent a lot of my childhood playing with computers, building and programming, and designing. I also had a big interest in other sciences as well. I competed in different math, physics, and chemistry competitions.

>>>

548th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Lloyed Lobo, Co-Founder of Boast.ai (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let me probe one thing here. When you were doing this manual customer servicing, was it more of a rule-based engine than pure AI?

Lloyed Lobo: First, it was fully manual. The rules-based engine was the Wizard-of-Oz MVP. It looks like technology but, on the backend, humans are doing it. There are two elements. You are collecting data. Then you need to process that data and generate the outcome. Then we started doing this data collection online where people can upload everything.

Video FAQs

9 Udemy Courses on How to Raise Post-Seed Startup Funding

Raising money is a huge challenge. To be able to raise any money at all, you must first understand how investors think.

This specific course covers how post-seed and pre-Series A investors analyze startups and what they are looking for. We will have in-depth conversations around startups and funding with several real-world investors.

Bootstrapping Using Services, then Raising $10M and Scaling to $16M: EZOPS Co-Founders Sarva Srinivasan and Dutt Chintalapati (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In 2018, are you still self-financed?

Sarva Srinivasan: Yes. At the end of 2018, we did a Series A. 

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise?

Sarva Srinivasan: $10 million.

Catching Up On Readings: FinTech 250

This report from CB Insights ranks the 250 most promising FinTech companies in the world that have together raised $73.8 billion in funding since 2016. It also provides insights into the leading categories and trends in the industry. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

548th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Lloyed Lobo, Co-Founder of Boast.ai (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How about getting your first product out? Were you bootstrapping to get to the first product?

Lloyed Lobo: We bootstrapped to about $10 million ARR. We just raised a round of funding around Thanksgiving last year.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk through the early part. You bootstrapped and you had validation because of your consulting work. How much of that consulting pool became customers of the product?

Bootstrapping Using Services, then Raising $10M and Scaling to $16M: EZOPS Co-Founders Sarva Srinivasan and Dutt Chintalapati (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You have a wonderful positioning because anything that has a compliance angle to it has a very mission-critical purchase cycle. You must have experienced pretty high-velocity customer building.

Sarva Srinivasan: That’s correct. In parallel, we started building EZOPS. As part of our engagement, we were talking with the clients and their challenges. Oftentimes, it was just a lack of an end-to-end platform. It could be that I have the wrong data. Therefore, I’m not able to send the right information to the regulators. It could be that I have 10 different applications sending the same data and I can’t figure out what the right data is. These are very simple problems.