categories
HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- 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 3)
Sramana Mitra: Artificial intelligence is something I know a lot about. Help me understand algorithmically or heuristically what the software is doing. How do you decide on what you are recommending a sales person to do? Zvi Band: We have an exact picture of who you know, when was the last time you spoke to
Raising Funding on AngelList: Contactually CEO Zvi Band (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a bit about customers before October 2011 and the 500 Startups funding. It sounds like you managed to get some customers to resonate with your idea. Who were those first customers? How did you get to them and what specifically did they tell you about what they wanted to see in
Building a Fast Growing FinTech Company from Utah: MX CEO Ryan Caldwell (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What about customer validation? How did you get this off the ground in terms of the early customers and customer input early on? Ryan Caldwell: We had to take really good care of the end user, which is our largest concern. If we don’t take good care of the customer, we can’t take
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