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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
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
Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: As an anecdote, I was at MIT in the mid 90’s. Richard Stallman was there. He was one of the first advocates of open source. This was 10 years before the timeframe that you’re talking about. Hiro Yoshikawa: That’s true. I could likely become the firsthand witness that Linux took to mainstream. 15
Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. A very interesting story of a big data infrastructure management startup. 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? Hiro Yoshikawa: I am a native Japanese. I was
Diamond Auctions Online: Benny De-Kalo, CEO of Worthy.com (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: Where are you today? What are the metrics of the business that you would like to share? Benny De-Kalo: I cannot share all the information, but I can tell you that we’re growing very fast. We have over 80,000 items and their total worth is over $280 million. We have almost 5,000 buyers
Diamond Auctions Online: Benny De-Kalo, CEO of Worthy.com (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: What was the inflection point of the business? When you raised A, you had a million in revenue but you didn’t have a full indication of how fast this was all going to go. At what point in the story did you find that inflection point and what was the driver of that inflection