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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
Bootstrapped First, Raise Money Later: Manick Bhan, CEO of Rukkus (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Let’s get back to the specifics of how you did it. Now that you are in the market, you have figured out that you can get to a million dollar run rate. What was the reason why people were buying from you versus these other players? You had all kinds of hypothesis intellectualizing
Bootstrapped First, Raise Money Later: Manick Bhan, CEO of Rukkus (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: How did you get your MVP out? Before you got any seed funding, I take it that you had to get an MVP launched and get some customers going. Manick Bhan: Yes. Sramana Mitra: That’s how the industry works. There are exceptions. Usually, first-time entrepreneurs are not exceptions. I’m just trying to see
Bootstrapped First, Raise Money Later: Manick Bhan, CEO of Rukkus (Part 3)
Manick Bhan: At a high level, the preparation included me learning how to code. I had spent about nine months on that. I spent a lot of time in my apartment staring at a blinking cursor on a black background. Every time I hit an error, I put that error into Google to figure out what
Bootstrapped First, Raise Money Later: Manick Bhan, CEO of Rukkus (Part 2)
Manick Bhan: Just a few years after that, you had these rumblings of the next big tech boom. When Facebook went public, it was an incredible experience to see a company that had grown up quietly and become so huge and valuable. At the same time, that same roommate who infected me with the finance bug ended
Bootstrapped First, Raise Money Later: Manick Bhan, CEO of Rukkus (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. “My journey was as unexceptional as you can imagine,” says Manick, in describing how he got to $1 million Annual Revenue Rate in transactions before raising financing. Read on for the whole story. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by going back to your very beginnings. I want
A Serial Entrepreneur’s Awesome Journey from Austin, Texas: Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: What were the financing rounds? You raised your first financing within 18 months when you were getting real traction so you did bootstrap the first phase. Jason Cohen: Right. In August of 2011, we raised our first little A round. Then a year later in the same month, we did a B round.
A Serial Entrepreneur’s Awesome Journey from Austin, Texas: Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: Where are we timeline-wise now? Jason Cohen: We’re still in the mid-2000s. Just accelerating through that, I sold Smart Bear in 2007. I left in 2009. I had to stick around for a year. Sramana Mitra: To whom did you sell this company to? Jason Cohen: There was another company called Automated QA.
A Serial Entrepreneur’s Awesome Journey from Austin, Texas: Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Being the author of a book gives you huge credibility. Jason Cohen: Even now when everyone knows you can publish, it does. We were doing enterprise sales where credibility is even more important. I remember being with a potential customer in San Diego. Our champion inside the company threw one of our books
