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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
Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Venky Balasubramanian, CEO of Plivo (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Your business model was in providing consulting services, training, and support? Venky Balasubramanian: Back then, we had no plan to monetize. This was still a project for us. We had no business model. Sramana Mitra: You were based in Bangalore and Mike was based in France? Venky Balasubramanian: Yes, I was in Bangalore
Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Venky Balasubramanian, CEO of Plivo (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: You didn’t have comparable functionality with Twilio? Venky Balasubramanian: We actually had better functionality back then in terms of what we launched and in the framework itself. We have a lot of incoming interest from customers of Twilio who liked what they saw. It was hard to believe for a lot of folks back
Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Venky Balasubramanian, CEO of Plivo (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What specifically were each of you trying to do? Venky Balasubramanian: I was trying to pull ideas for my new startup back then. The first idea I had was a click-to-call. My co-founder was trying to build a framework for these IVRs. I was trying to build a framework to basically call to
Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Venky Balasubramanian, CEO of Plivo (Part 1)
Venky has built a fast growing, profitable company with just $2 million in angel financing, raised as two convertible notes. Excellent navigation, and a lot to learn in the domain of smart, capital-efficient entrepreneurship. As we are bound to see the market crash in the upcoming quarters, these are the type of companies that will
Scaling to $10 Million from Kentucky: Steve Huey, CEO of Capture Higher Ed (Part 7)
Steve Huey: University of Pittsburgh is a client, and we’ve had conversations with people at Princeton. Some of these schools have more applicants than they need. What they’re chasing is the right applicant. By understanding the behaviour of students and their families, you can market to them that you can assist them in finding the information
Scaling to $10 Million from Kentucky: Steve Huey, CEO of Capture Higher Ed (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting in your story? Are there any other strategic moves that you want to discuss? Steve Huey: One of the biggest things that happened was about a year and a half ago, when we were introduced to a McKinsey study that talks about a consumer’s decision journey. The story that
Scaling to $10 Million from Kentucky: Steve Huey, CEO of Capture Higher Ed (Part 5)
Steve Huey: Understanding that this data advantage was the key for us to talk more intelligently to students, we started hammering on that perceived advantage. Very quickly, we expanded the data set that we had so that we could talk more intelligently to them. In the next generation of our product, we created a lot
Scaling to $10 Million from Kentucky: Steve Huey, CEO of Capture Higher Ed (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: How did you acquire these customers? Can you get a bit more granular? Steve Huey: Certainly. We were six co-founders. Two of the co-founders were sales people that had deep relationships with many schools. They simply called their best customers and said, “We have a new company. We’re doing this. We explained our strategy