Sramana Mitra: So, tell me exactly what happened. What did you have in the product when customers started asking, “How much”?
David Villalon: The main problem we had was that we’d built an engine we could personally make do anything. We could customize it for any customer, but that approach didn’t scale.
>>>Today’s 705th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable for Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, October 23, at 8 a.m. PDT / 11 a.m. EDT / 5 p.m. CEST / 8:30 p.m. India IST. CLICK HERE to join. PASSWORD: startup All are welcome!

I want to share with you an observation from running the 1Mby1M program since 2008. Almost 700 free mentoring roundtables with over 300k entrepreneurs. Thousands of case studies of successful entrepreneurs – the who’s who of tech startups – through interview based methodology development. Thousands and thousands of premium member coaching sessions.
Entrepreneurs are obsessed with financing.

The Accelerator Conundrum is a multipart series that challenges the prevailing wisdom of the tech startup ecosystem that entrepreneurs should Blitzscale out of the gate. Written by Sramana Mitra, the Founder and CEO of One Million by One Million (1Mby1M), the world’s first global virtual accelerator, it emphatically argues that a better strategy is to Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later, focus on customers, revenues and profits. 1Mby1M’s mission is to help a Million entrepreneurs reach a million dollars in annual revenue and beyond. Sramana’s Digital Mind AI Mentor virtually mentors entrepreneurs around the world in 57 languages. Try it out!
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>>>Sramana Mitra: Double-click down on where you were — what use case you were applying this knowledge processing unit workflow to?
David Villalon: In the early days, that was one of the biggest questions we had to solve.
Sramana Mitra: For your startup, that’s always the biggest question you have to solve.
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I want to share with you an observation from running the 1Mby1M program since 2008. Almost 700 free mentoring roundtables with over 300k entrepreneurs. Thousands of case studies of successful entrepreneurs – the who’s who of tech startups – through interview based methodology development. Thousands and thousands of premium member coaching sessions.
Some entrepreneurs are over-anxious about confidentiality.

David discusses his journey building an enterprise AI venture with 15 large enterprise customers who are implementing real use cases built on the Maisa platform. These use cases are not POC experiments. They are in production. The customer base currently is mostly European enterprises. This is going to be a very valuable company.
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I want to share with you an observation from running the 1Mby1M program since 2008. Almost 700 free mentoring roundtables with over 300k entrepreneurs. Thousands of case studies of successful entrepreneurs – the who’s who of tech startups – through interview based methodology development. Thousands and thousands of premium member coaching sessions.
A lot of entrepreneurs are looking for silver bullets.
They are not necessarily interested in doing the hard work needed to build a sustainable business.
Building a business is a marathon, not a sprint.
We don’t have silver bullets. No one does.