548th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Lloyed Lobo, Co-Founder of Boast.ai (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: ARR is now your business model right? Lloyed Lobo: We look at it as ARR. For every year a company does R&D, they pay us. It’s recurring. Although we take a percentage, it’s very consistent with how much R&D they do. That’s how we model it out.  Sramana Mitra: How many customers is

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548th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Lloyed Lobo, Co-Founder of Boast.ai (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did you manage the early phase where you had to stay afloat to get paid? Lloyed Lobo: With the help of loans, houses bank loans, credit cards, and very lean teams. Sramana Mitra: How many were you? Lloyed Lobo: When we started, it was just me and my co-founder. Then there was

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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

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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

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548th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Lloyed Lobo, Co-Founder of Boast.ai (Part 2)

Lloyed Lobo: R&D tax credit is a beachhead for us. My co-founder used to run this at KPMG. He was a manager at the R&D tax credit team. He said that it’s a manual and broken process. At the end of the year, we would go to companies and say, “Give us your shoebox.” But

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

Lloyed Lobo, Co-founder and President of Boast.ai, discusses his failures and eventual success building AI startups. Wonderful conversation! Sramana Mitra: Welcome Lloyed. I’m looking forward to know you and understanding what you’re doing.  Lloyed Lobo: Thanks for having me.

548th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Lloyed Lobo, Boast.ai

Lloyed Lobo, Co-founder and President of Boast.ai, discusses his failures and eventual success building AI startups. Wonderful conversation.