Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Getting companies fundable is a high-touch process. That is not necessarily a scalable process. I would say we may be the only accelerator in the world that has done some scalability on that. We have created a lot of curriculum. We’ve done so many now. It’s like pattern matching. That takes time. One

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after Art.com? Josh Chodniewicz: We were in San Francisco. I moved to New York and lived a couple of years there. Frankly, I think I dealt with an identity crisis. All I knew was Art.com. I had to get around that. I started making investments in startups. I saw

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: We are now in 2004? Josh Chodniewicz: 2001 was when we acquired Art.com. Then 2004 was when we raised $30 million and combined it with our leading competitor at that time called AllPosters. I called up the other CEO and said, “We can shoot bullets at each other or we can join and

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the revenue trajectory with search engine and affiliate marketing as the drivers? Josh Chodniewicz: The other consumer driver for us was our partnership with eBay in 1998 to list our products. We were talking to eBay about why their marketplace didn’t have the traction. The problem was their listing fee. They

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Why Art.com? Josh Chodniewicz: This was in 1994. It was a while ago. A buddy of mine called me up. He was at Virginia Tech. He was getting his Computer Science degree there. He said, “Josh, I know something that’s going to be huge one day – the internet.” We started talking about

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Art.com CEO Josh Chodniewicz (Part 1)

Josh bootstrapped for 10 years before raising a $30M first round of funding. Read on to learn more about his journey. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raise, and in what kind of background?

567th Roundtable Recording with Zain Jaffer, Blue Field Capital

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: 567th 1Mby1M Roundtable with Zain Jaffer, Blue Field Capital

Roundtable Recap: March 10 – Spotlight on PropTech

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Zain Jaffer, Partner at Blue Field Capital, discussing trends in PropTech. Pathaway As for entrepreneur pitch today, we had Crystal Williams from Cleveland, Ohio, pitch Pathaway. She has an interesting decision ahead: to build a business or do a non-profit with her concept. You can listen

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