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HOT TOPICS
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
Raising Funding on AngelList: Contactually CEO Zvi Band (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What year are we at now? Zvi Band: Around 2010. I had just been the CTO of an enterprise startup. I was consulting. I then tried starting my own projects. It was called Structo. Are you familiar with parse and convey and all these backend service tools? Sramana Mitra: No. Zvi Band: The
Building a Fast Growing FinTech Company from Utah: MX CEO Ryan Caldwell (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What happens after? Ryan Caldwell: I went to do consulting. I wanted to be at the heart of San Francisco. I did consulting for companies like Microsoft and Visa in London and Singapore. Sramana Mitra: What was the next major thing that you did after selling this company? Ryan Caldwell: I gained some
Raising Funding on AngelList: Contactually CEO Zvi Band (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Zvi has raised several rounds of financing on AngelList in the process of building Contactually. Among other things, his experience with the platform is interesting in this interview. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were
Building a Fast Growing FinTech Company from Utah: MX CEO Ryan Caldwell (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Ryan self-financed, with some seed money, a FinTech company selling to small financial institutions. Today, the company has delivered 185% y-o-y growth for five consecutive years. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised,
Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: For your core business, you go seek out customers in a direct selling model. The open-source conversion is not your core business? Hiro Yoshikawa: Correct. This is one of the interesting challenges that we are facing right now. Some investors called us open-source business 2.0. Historically, the open-source commercialization companies have a very typical
Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Did you raise money in 2012 and how much? Hiro Yoshikawa: We raised an additional $1.8 million of seed extension round in 2012 led by Jerry Yang and Dan Scheinman. We ended up raising the very first venture capital round in July of 2013 led by Tim Guleri of Sierra Ventures. Sramana Mitra:
Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Give me an example of your first customer who understood your vision and signed up. What was the process of getting to your first customer? Hiro Yoshikawa: We started the company operations in December 2011. We launched the initial product in September of 2012. Sramana Mitra: You raised venture capital before all this?
Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: You already started thinking about doing something of your own? Hiro Yoshikawa: He influenced me to start thinking about it. I have to say that until I met him, I didn’t really have any clear idea about starting my own company. He was the influencer. We had joint trips together. When I took