Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I got this. You basically had a project within IBM that IBM didn’t want to pursue. You wanted to pursue it and, with IBM’s blessing, you spun it out as a separate company? Frank Sheppard: Correct. IBM had no part in the founding of that company except to say

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June 25 – 265th 1M/1M Mentoring Roundtable For Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 265th FREE online 1M/1M roundtable mentoring session on Thursday, June 25, 2015, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea to Sramana Mitra. You’ll gain straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and she’ll answer any

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Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Are the real estate agents part of this marketplace or are you working with buyers and sellers, and the brokers are out of the picture? Jeff Frieden: The brokers are in the picture. Sramana Mitra: The people who are actually handling the transactions are still the brokers. Jeff Frieden: We go directly to

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Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 1)

Frank and his co-founders have built a sizeable bootstrapped business in North Carolina. Read on to learn what has worked for Ateb and what you can learn from them. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your story. Where do you come from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of

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Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The entity that you sold to private equity was still REDC? Jeff Frieden: That’s right. Sramana Mitra: You bought the Auction.com domain name and rebranded your original entity as Auction.com? Jeff Frieden: Correct. Sramana Mitra: It seems you’re doing hybrid auctions but you’ve expanded from residential distressed properties to commercial distressed properties.

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You were still focusing only on real estate? Jeff Frieden: Only on real estate. Then the market crashed in 2007. We were able to pivot very quickly to help out institutions like large banks that had a tsunami of foreclosures coming in when the market blew up. In 2007, we held our first

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Bootstrapping a Highly Profitable Company in Social Media Marketing: Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford (Part 6)

Jamie Tedford: Acquisition was strategically important for us because it completed what we thought was an important part of our story and what the market was telling us, which is that brands and agencies wanted to work from one platform. There’s this converged media phrase that had taken hold at that time. We really believed

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264th Roundtable Recording On June 18, 2015: Billion Dollar Unicorns with René Lacerte, Bill.com

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: