Sramana Mitra: It’s a very interesting angle to entrepreneurship that you shared. Colin Campbell: I have a unique perspective in that I’ve done company after company. I’ve worked at a larger company. The interesting thing is you begin to see patterns emerge. This is where I’ve been able to learn a bit of a formula
Sramana Mitra: You sold at the right time because after the iPhone and mobile advertising, the whole ad rate world just collapsed. Yaron Galai: Generally, it did. We sold at a very pretty good time. I do know that just by talking to a friend from AOL that they kept running Quigo as an independent
Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about what was in the product that drove that much increase. What did you do in the product that allowed you to go to that level of scaling? Kean Graham: Because the product is intrinsically scalable and because we were leveraging Google’s technology, we were able to take all
Sramana Mitra: Given that was your observation and that was you interest, how did that manifest in the next startup? Yaron Galai: In 2000, I started a company called Quigo. It was a mix of similar ideas that my co-founder and I had started working on independently. We merged it as one company. The idea
Sramana Mitra: You don’t sell directly. You sell through other domain name sellers like GoDaddy? Colin Campbell: That is correct. We’ve gone to all the GoDaddy’s around the world. The largest company in China is Alibaba. They’re the ones with the largest distribution for domain names and websites. We sell through Alibaba in China as
Sramana Mitra: It makes a big difference. At this point, were you still a solopreneur or were other people in the picture? Kean Graham: There were other people in the picture. I hired my parents part-time. I outsourced certain operations to other people. We were looking into certain partnerships at that time. I was getting
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Yaron came with a clear notion of how he wanted to recommend content and monetize those recommendations. It took, however, many years before the market caught up with his vision. It has now. The company is going gangbusters. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning
Sramana Mitra: How much money did it take to get this rolling? Colin Campbell: We’ve raised $11.6 million to date. Initially, I put some of my own funds into it. Sramana Mitra: So you did not fund it yourself? You did take financing? Colin Campbell: I didn’t take any financing. The way it worked is