555th Roundtable For Entrepreneurs Starting NOW: Live Tweeting By @1Mby1M

Today’s 555th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, December 2, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click HERE to join. PASSWORD: startup  All are welcome!

Solo Student Entrepreneur to Over $50M Revenue: Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What about the business model? Erik Allebest: We didn’t know. At first, we thought we’d be selling ads against it. We quickly realized that it wasn’t going to pay for itself. Also, we didn’t love ads as users. But we had this content that we had bought along with the domain name called

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping an Artificial Intelligence Startup with Services: Nitesh Chawla, Founder, Aunalytics (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The other thing that you said is early validation. If you look at our work, we use different kinds of bootstrapping techniques. One of them is Bootstrapping using Services. What you’re describing is exactly that, which is going to customers and taking services projects with a specific problem domain in mind. Then you

Read Full Article »

Solo Student Entrepreneur to Over $50M Revenue: Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next? Erik Allebest: I had an internship at a big tech company. I wasn’t that interested in it. Frankly, I did a bunch of internships while I was at Stanford. Pretty much every person I met with at every big company wanted to talk about entrepreneurship. None of them love their

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping an Artificial Intelligence Startup with Services: Nitesh Chawla, Founder, Aunalytics (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much seed funding did you get? Nitesh Chawla: I don’t remember, but it was enough to pay salaries for multiple individuals. Sramana Mitra: Like in the hundreds of thousands?

Solo Student Entrepreneur to Over $50M Revenue: Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest (Part 2)

Erik Allebest: In 1998, my Chess Club President friend said, “Let’s build a website together.” He built a platform for me to sell Chess equipment online. It became known as Wholesale Chess. It became the largest chess retailer online. This was before Amazon. I sold the business of teaching and moved to e-commerce. I did

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping an Artificial Intelligence Startup with Services: Nitesh Chawla, Founder, Aunalytics (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What you’re describing is the journey of a lot of techies into entrepreneurship as well. It’s not about technology looking for a problem to solve. It’s about identifying the problem and then figuring out how to solve that problem using technology. In AI, this is a major issue. Nitesh Chawla: It truly is.

Read Full Article »

Solo Student Entrepreneur to Over $50M Revenue: Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest (Part 1)

Solo entrepreneurs get a bad rap, but they’re kicking ass out there! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Erik Allebest: I was born in Southern California. I was born to an entrepreneurial family. My dad

Read Full Article »