Best of Bootstrapping: Leveraged Domain Knowledge and Bootstrapped to $15M

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

Ernie Bray, Chairman and CEO of AutoClaims Direct (ACD), leveraged his domain knowledge in auto insurance claims processing, and built a robust, sustainable business. When we spoke in 2015, he was using a virtual workforce strategy to scale.

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

Ernie Bray: I was born in a small town in Central California called Porterville, California. It’s a farming community. My dad was a teacher. My mom stayed at home and took care of us. I grew up in a small town environment.

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Featured Videos

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Gaurav Chaturvedi, Partner at Kae Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: And what are you seeing on the BPO side? BPO is the lowest hanging fruit for AI to automate. This discussion that we just had applies very well to BPO, right? You can automate a very large part of what is being done in a human BPO mode. A lot of that can be AI enabled, but it can still continue to be in this do-it-for-me (DIFM) mode.

 So are you seeing whole BPO workflows turning to AI companies?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Gaurav Chaturvedi, Partner at Kae Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: That’s yet another nuance on it. That is basically developing, having AI platforms, AI technology tools, and then developing solutions for people. So that’s more of a traditional solution services companies that are now AI enabled solution services.

Video FAQs

Colors: Rainwashed Blooms

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 – Rainwashed Blooms

Rainwashed Blooms | Sramana Mitra, 2022 | Watercolor, Ink | 8  x 8, On Paper

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Gaurav Chaturvedi, Partner at Kae Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. The reason I’m asking this question Gaurav is, so as you know, AI is easier to control in a more constrained mode. The more degrees of freedom you give it, the more it is difficult to control all the issues like hallucination and precision. AI has a tendency to make things up and go a little bit haywire. I’m very curious about what is going to happen when this is actually operating in real world scenarios and how are they constraining?

Colors: Lighthouse III

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 – Lighthouse III

Lighthouse III | Sramana Mitra, 2022 | Watercolor, Ink | 8  x 8, On Paper

AI Unicorns: Hugging Face’s Successful Pivot Away from Teenage Chatbot Engine

According to a recent report, the global Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) market is expected to grow at 44% CAGR to reach $13.3 billion by 2030 from $720 million in 2022. MLOps vendors perform activities that range from supporting model training, testing and validation, deployment, automated model validation, and continuous delivery and deployment.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Gaurav Chaturvedi, Partner at Kae Capital (Part 1)

Gaurav Chaturvedi, Partner at Kae Capital, discusses the trends he is seeing in the Indian startup ecosystem.