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?
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
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.
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
Nitesh bootstrapped Aunalytics while keeping his academic job at Notre Dame. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
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Sramana Mitra: Once you had the Series A, what was the next major inflection point? What strategic moves did you make to get to that? Jeremy Swift: I would say it was about just further refinement of what our ICP was and figuring out go-to-market too. That was a hard thing to navigate. It took
Sramana Mitra: How did you get your first customer? Jeremy Swift: By scratching, clawing, begging, and pleading. We had a pretty great wealth of relationships. Sramana Mitra: That was my question. Did you go back to those relationships? When you have domain experience, you also have relationships in a category. It’s easier to sell into