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Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ranker CEO Clark Benson (Part 6)

Posted on Saturday, Dec 16th

Sramana Mitra: Where to from here? You are profitable already. Is this a company that now stops raising money and goes to some sort of exit in the near term? Clark Benson: That’s a great question. We don’t have to raise money which is a great position to be in. I’m terrible at raising money,

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Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ranker CEO Clark Benson (Part 5)

Posted on Friday, Dec 15th

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk a little bit about how your investors are viewing the scale potential of your company given the business model that you’ve chosen. What are the discussions that you have with your investors regarding scale? Clark Benson: I need to explain something else to clarify that. Almost every other Internet publisher

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Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ranker CEO Clark Benson (Part 4)

Posted on Thursday, Dec 14th

Sramana Mitra: When did you launch Ranker? Clark Benson: We launched it in August of 2009. Sramana Mitra: When you launched, what was the reception in the market? Clark Benson: We launched the site with 20,000 lists on it. It started getting traffic. It took a few months to get search traffic. I’m not very

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Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ranker CEO Clark Benson (Part 3)

Posted on Wednesday, Dec 13th

Sramana Mitra: What was the business model? Clark Benson: We were living a little bit in a vacuum. The company had moved back to Chicago. I was in LA. I wasn’t very well networked in the Internet space at that time. There were very few internet companies in Chicago. My co-founders were not very well-networked.

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Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ranker CEO Clark Benson (Part 2)

Posted on Tuesday, Dec 12th

Sramana Mitra: What years are we talking now? Clark Benson: I launched the company in 1995. I started launching other businesses about a year and a half later. I opened up a record store with a friend of mine. That was somewhat of a mistake. I had that for five years. I didn’t make a

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Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Ranker CEO Clark Benson (Part 1)

Posted on Monday, Dec 11th

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  “I hate raising money and I am not good at it…” – says Clark Benson, with a laugh. The company is growing nicely and profitably. Read on! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born,

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