Sramana Mitra: 2010 was when you decided to launch the company. Ron Rudzin: That’s correct. Ricky Joshi: It was a soft launch. We got kickstarted towards the tail-end of 2010. Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the very beginning. What is a soft launch? What were you doing in 2010? What were you trying to
Ron and Ricky have built a luxury mattress brand online. Learn how. 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? Ricky Joshi: I’m from Columbus, Ohio and went to Dartmouth for undergraduate. I went on
Sramana Mitra: How many private jet operator companies are out there? Jonny Nicol: In the US, there are 3,300 private jet companies, which have a thing called 135 accreditation. That’s a legal FAA requirement to be a charter company. We deal with only 500 of them because we want to make sure that we’re only
Sramana Mitra: How many people were on the team at this point when you were going through this? Jonny Nicol: Six months earlier, there were 16 people. I actually let people go before we ran out of money, which was painful. Then there were eight of us. It wasn’t actually the case that they could work
Sramana Mitra: I completely agree with you. Daniel Scandian: The priority is to be profitable and grow. If I don’t reach profitability, it can be very difficult. The company has to remain profitable. We are 230 people right now. We need to add another 200 people in the next two years. Sramana Mitra: What happened to
Sramana Mitra: Do you need to a raise more money or are you planning to now keep growing organically? Daniel Scandian: Now, we are breaking even. Last year, we achieved $65 million in revenue and we plan to reach around $150 million in 2017. We are cash flow positive now. Just now, we are building
Sramana Mitra: Is there a convenient way to get the database of all the private jets’ flights just like an online travel agency for commercial flights can access such a database? Is there an equivalent of that database available somewhere or did you have to create that? Jonny Nicol: I had to build it from
Daniel Scandian: We realized that that process was the same that should work in Brazil. Of course, the software was a little bit different, but the workflow was quite the same. We were lucky for them to open to us. We went to Brazil and started building a software. The Brazilian market is much more