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- The Accelerator Conundrum
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ChaiOne
Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a $7M Company in Houston
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. My conversation from 2014 with Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne, became an interesting strategy discussion about a company doing substantial revenue based on services, had productized a piece of its services business that was also generating over a million in revenue. Sramana: Gaurav, let’s go to
Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping a $7M Company in Houston
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. My conversation from 2014 with Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne, became an interesting strategy discussion about a company doing substantial revenue based on services, had productized a piece of its services business that was also generating over a million in revenue. Sramana: Gaurav, let’s go to
Bootstrapping a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 7)
Sramana: Let’s talk about oil and gas as an industry and how it consumes IT. You have talked about the application you are now taking to this industry. What other use cases can you see in that space? Gaurav Khandelwal: First of all, it is very difficult to get into these companies. The older workforce
Bootstrapping a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 6)
Sramana: Are you still a services company or have you developed a product now? Gaurav Khandelwal: We have 55 developers in Houston. We did develop products over the years. Only one product is still active among the products that we have produced in the past four years. Last year, we felt we had learned our
Bootstrapping a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 5)
Sramana: When did you start hiring people? What year? Gaurav Khandelwal: I hired the first three in February of 2010. That year, we hired 22 people, all in Houston. Sramana: Where you at in terms of revenue in 2010? Gaurav Khandelwal: In 2009, we doubled our revenue from 2008, and in 2010, we tripled our
Bootstrapping a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 4)
Sramana: Who were you going after in terms of clientele? Gaurav Khandelwal: In the beginning, I was going after companies that had an appetite for innovation. Primarily, they were small and medium businesses. I often ran into entrepreneurs who were looking to build their ideas into the next big thing. This was happening in 2008
Bootstrapping a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 3)
Sramana: What specifically did you do when you launched ChaiOne? Who was your first customer? Gaurav Khandelwal: I was dating a girl at the time who is now my wife. She was working at Microsoft and called me on a Friday night frantic. Her boss needed something done by Monday morning and it was something
Bootstrapping a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 2)
Sramana: Paying off all of your college debt is not a bad exit from your first company! Gaurav Khandelwal: I agree that it was very timely. It also gave me a taste for entrepreneurship. After I graduated, I went to work for a consulting firm in New York. I quickly found out that I could
