Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Was the seed that you got enough to get you to the next milestone or did you have to raise? Brad Peters: We raised seed financing before we started. We couldn’t afford to make the mortgage payment without a little bit of seed financing. We got a little bit of seed financing from

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Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do in 2005 when you started this company? Brad Peters: We needed to do two things. We had to get some funding because we didn’t have personal savings to be able to survive very long. We needed some seed capital. We spent a lot of time thinking through markets where,

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Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You were at Siebel through that acquisition? Brad Peters: No, I wasn’t. You could see the writing on the wall. Analytics was exploding. We were doing really well, but the rest of the company was not doing so well. It was actually shrinking. You could tell that the company was on a collision

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Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Birst’s beginnings had many of the same principles that we espouse in 1M/1M, engaging customers in paying relationships early on being the foremost. Today, the company has raised four rounds of venture capital, and is growing fast as a regular Silicon Valley-style pre-IPO company. Sramana Mitra:

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Serial Entrepreneur, Self-Financing to $50 Million: GoGrid CEO, John Keagy (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: So you have multiple technology stacks available as a service from your company for people looking for hosted Big Data platforms and you work with these platform vendors to offer them as a service.

Serial Entrepreneur, Self-Financing to $50 Million: GoGrid CEO, John Keagy (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In terms 0f the complexity of the R&D, how much of that was predicated on being able to get the right technical talent? There’s definitely a truth – not just a myth – that it’s harder for self-financed companies to attract the top talent. Everybody’s looking at which VC is funding the company

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Serial Entrepreneur, Self-Financing to $50 Million: GoGrid CEO, John Keagy (Part 5)

John Keagy: I have to tell you a story about InReach internet. I ordered three phone lines into my apartment. One was the sales line, one was support, and one was the billing line. I was answering all three phones. I’d use a different voice on each of the phones to make it sound like

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Serial Entrepreneur, Self-Financing to $50 Million: GoGrid CEO, John Keagy (Part 4)

John Keagy: There’s a famous sociologist at my college called Harry Edwards. Harry Edwards was the first guy to say that professional athletes are not role models. Charles Barkley was the first professional athlete to implore kids, especially inter-city youths, to not see him as their role model. He said, “Don’t try to make your

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