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
An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: You brought this person on as CEO? Cameron Weeks: No, I’ve always been the CEO of Fathom. We brought him in a very senior role as a Vice President. He was essentially supposed to come in and run sales and marketing, and control the revenue side of the company, which I agreed to. I’m a
Building a Sustainable, Capital-Efficient Business: Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: Content marketing is actually an extremely effective method of customer acquisition, but not everything converts. There’s content and then there’s actual conversion. The tricky thing is to make content marketing convert. There’s this brand awareness that does very well with content marketing and not in every category does content marketing convert into actual
An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: But your target customer strategy was local. That’s how you were getting these customers, right? Cameron Weeks: That’s how we started. It was local. Once we had established the client base in the local market, we found a very well-established channel partner. They go by the term telecom partners. We found that were
Building a Sustainable, Capital-Efficient Business: Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: You talked about the first newsletter that Amit Gupta got you into and you got several thousand sign ups from that. Is there a dominant segment type of users that stores their materials on your server? Gleb Budman: It’s all sorts of people. Photographers are a large percentage because it’s completely unlimited back
An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: From whom did you raise $500,000? Cameron Weeks: We got lucky. We say that this company is very blessed. One of the partners that came in was actually a VC firm from California called Small World Group. Sramana Mitra: Is this Frank Levinson? Cameron Weeks: Yes, you know Frank? Sramana Mitra: Very well,
Building a Sustainable, Capital-Efficient Business: Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: You started this in 2007? Gleb Budman: Exactly. Sramana Mitra: You self-financed it with your colleagues? Gleb Budman: We did. It was definitely a long, crazy journey. Five of us committed to a year without salary. That would be the seed round. We then had two more people who joined us. We call
An Emerging Success Story from Indiana: Fathom Voice CEO Cameron Weeks (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: It was kind of off-the-cuff basically. Cameron Weeks: Yes. As we were running the web company, we were doing that. Sramana Mitra: By the end of 2008, you had sold the web company, right? Cameron Weeks: Yes, it was closer to 2009. Sramana Mitra: What happened in 2009? What did you do next?
Building a Sustainable, Capital-Efficient Business: Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: I noticed that you said solve the problem that people were not backing up data. You can create back-up opportunities. How do you solve the problem that people were not backing up data? Gleb Budman: The reason I say that what we were trying to do was solve that problem was because back-up