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carl ryden
Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to Over $10M and a Big Exit
If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. CEO Carl Ryden and his co-founders had bootstrapped PrecisionLender to over $10 million from North Carolina when we spoke in 2017. This is a superb story, including how the company has formulated an AI agent, Andi. Q2 acquired PrecisionLender for $510 million in 2019. Sramana
Best of Bootstrapping: PrecisionLender CEO Bootstraps to Over $10M from North Carolina
CEO Carl Ryden and his co-founders have bootstrapped Precision Lender to over $10 million from North Carolina. This is a superb story, including how the company has formulated an AI agent, Andi. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in
Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 7)
Carl Ryden: Andi is every relationship manager’s dream analyst. She’s there with you in every deal. She sees what you’re doing. She sees your entire portfolio. She’s there with you to help you find ways to make that work better for the customer and the bank. How it came to be is, we had a
Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: What did you do and what model were you trying to reach? Carl Ryden: There were a couple things that changed during that time. One is, the transactional sales people that we hired were not a good fit for our culture and how we operated. When we made changes, we wrote down our values.
Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: You must have had a lot of relationships in that business since you were coming into this business trying to do something better than what you’ve done before. Did many of those relationships convert into paying customers? Carl Ryden: Yes. We call them switchers. We get someone to switch from something they had
Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: I need you to step through the process of building this company. Let’s start by zeroing in on the concept that you and Ken agreed on, and how you came up with that concept. Carl Ryden: We started with a general framework of building a business where it has primary value through its
Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: What were you trying to build? Carl Ryden: I wanted to build software that helped manage configurations of home electronics. You can drag them on and it would tell you the best way to hook up your home stereo. It was called hookitupright.com. I built the application and put a lot of time
Bootstrapping to $10M+ from North Carolina: Carl Ryden, CEO of PrecisionLender (Part 2)
Carl Ryden: We did the Thinkpad 350, 425, 701 and all of that. It was great fun. It was one of the best teams I had ever worked on. While I was there, IBM shutdown the PC company and moved it to Raleigh. They moved all the notebook development to Yamato Labs in Japan, and we were
