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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
Peruvian Entrepreneur, Bootstrapping to $200 Million: Belisario Rosas, CEO of WEI (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: You have chosen to grow it to a substantial level with profits. What do you want to do with this company? Is it something you’re looking to sell? Do you want to continue running it forever? Belisario Rosas: Continue it. We run the company like a family business. We want to be one
Building a Capital Marketplace for Mid-Market Businesses: Axial CEO Peter Lehrman (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: You were providing the management tools on the transaction but you were also making those connections. Peter Lehrman: Yes. At the core of Axial is a search engine that looks at the data related to the company that is raising capital or is for sale. It looks at all the data that is
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Wrike CEO Andrew Filev (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: I understand that you constantly test and experiment but there must have been some kind of institutional truths that were emerging in terms of your pricing and business model? Andrew Filev: One of the big things that we found is this switch to packages in the SMB digital space. We tested and we’re
Peruvian Entrepreneur, Bootstrapping to $200 Million: Belisario Rosas, CEO of WEI (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Did you have that tendency of trying to do it all before this change happened? Belisario Rosas: Very much. I was buying. I was selling. I was doing everything. Sramana Mitra: You were running a substantial revenue company but you did not have any executive team? Belisario Rosas: That is correct. Sramana Mitra:
Building a Capital Marketplace for Mid-Market Businesses: Axial CEO Peter Lehrman (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What kind of traction did you see? With that industrial manufacturing concentration, what kind of traction did you see in the beginning? Peter Lehrman: Very quickly, we had customers willing to pay us a couple of hundred dollars a month on the demand side. The private equity community was ready to pay –
Peruvian Entrepreneur, Bootstrapping to $200 Million: Belisario Rosas, CEO of WEI (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Let me actually probe each of those points a bit. Did you, at this point, become an e-commerce site? Were people ordering online? Belisario Rosas: No. We barely, to this date, do any type of e-commerce. All of it is solution-based and face-to-face selling. Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about solution service infrastructure
Building a Capital Marketplace for Mid-Market Businesses: Axial CEO Peter Lehrman (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: How much are we talking? What kind of capital base did you start with? Peter Lehrman: About a million. Sramana Mitra: How did you bring this two-sided marketplace together? There’s always a chicken and egg in marketplaces. What was your strategy to bridge that? Peter Lehrman: We built two products and launched them
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Wrike CEO Andrew Filev (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: What state was Wrike at when you came to Silicon Valley? Did you have something? Did you have an MVP that you started to work on? Andrew Filev: It was a very early prototype. I think we launched a beta version at a conference in Paris. Then right after that, I moved to the