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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
Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: What specifically did you do as you started this company? Michael Sikorsky: I got the best term for it from Michael Gerber. I actually had an entrepreneurial fever and had no clue what I had to do next. I just decided to do it. It’s not something I would recommend. I had only
Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What kind of company did you join? Michael Sikorsky: It was a supervised control and data acquisition company. They sold software to pipeline companies that wanted to monitor what’s going on across all their pipelines. What is the pressure? What is going on? There is a visualization aspect, remote monitoring, and then there’s a hardware
Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 1)
The story of a serial entrepreneur from an off-center place, this time Alberta, Canada. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Michael Sikorsky: I was born in Alberta, which is in Canada in 1972. I’m
Bootstrapping From Oklahoma: Robin Smith, CEO of WeGoLook (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What would the platform do? What was the idea? Robin Smith: The idea behind it was really crowdsourcing. This was even before Uber. Even Dave Berkus calls us as the Uber of inspections. I had this idea to create a platform that would connect agents out in the field. I tried to think of
Bootstrapping From Oklahoma: Robin Smith, CEO of WeGoLook (Part 1)
How often do you hear of a successful entrepreneurship story out of Oklahoma? Well, meet Robin Smith. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of circumstances? Robin Smith: I was born in Oklahoma. I was raised, primarily, on
Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Venky Balasubramanian, CEO of Plivo (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: What, specifically, in terms of levers were you able to push by investing more aggressively? What could money buy you? Venky Balasubramanian: This was around technology at that point because we were in a market where we had to move fast in terms of what we were going to be releasing. Things were changing
Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Venky Balasubramanian, CEO of Plivo (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: However, your per minute numbers are a premium over the carrier’s per minute numbers that you have to turn around and pay, right? Venky Balasubramanian: Technically, yes but not really. In practice if you go to a carrier directly, what you do in effect is a service running more than 10,000 minutes. Our price
Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Venky Balasubramanian, CEO of Plivo (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: If I were making that decision, I would have made a different decision. If I had $15,000 to $20,000 coming from two customers, I would not raise angel financing and part with equity at that point. Venky Balasubramanian: I agree, which is why I’ll get to what we did a year later. A