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- The Startup Velocity Question
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- Man and Superman
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Bootstrapping from Australia: Emagine CEO Dave Peters (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to? What year were you thinking of starting a company of your own? Dave Peters: I started in 1998. Sramana Mitra: You were based in Paris at this point? Dave Peters: Yes, I was in Paris. Everyone’s got email and computing is starting, but we’re a
Bootstrapping to $200 Million: Jorn Lyseggen, CEO of Meltwater (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: What is the geographical center of gravity of the company? Is it still Norwegian? Jorn Lyseggen: The center of gravity of the company is San Francisco. We moved to the US in 2005. I personally moved to the US in 2005. My management team is distributed all over the world. The organization is distributed
Bootstrapping from Australia: Emagine CEO Dave Peters (Part 1)
Dave Peters has managed to bootstrap a significant software company from Australia. The focus is on TELCO churn management, and the customer base is primarily Australian, Asian, and African. Read this interview to learn more of the nuances. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born,
Bootstrapping to $200 Million: Jorn Lyseggen, CEO of Meltwater (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: The sales model was inside sales, I presume, because of the price point that you quoted, yes? Jorn Lyseggen: Correct. Sramana Mitra: Obviously, you’ve grown at a very nice rate. You’ve self-financed this business. What else have you done from a strategic point of view that has helped you achieve this kind of
Bootstrapping to $200 Million: Jorn Lyseggen, CEO of Meltwater (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: In terms of customer traction, what did this altered process yield for you? Let’s say the first year of this altered process, how much did you sell? Jorn Lyseggen: Our sales was probably half a million dollars. Sramana Mitra: What was the pricing model? How were you charging? Jorn Lyseggen: It was a
Bootstrapping to $200 Million: Jorn Lyseggen, CEO of Meltwater (Part 4)
Jorn Lyseggen: We started approaching this in a completely different way. We tried hiring our own sales people. We wanted to engage the clients in a much more strategic way. Instead of talking about our product, we wanted to engage the clients on their domain and try to understand their pain. Once we understood their
Bootstrapping to $200 Million: Jorn Lyseggen, CEO of Meltwater (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: What happens next? You’ve been running this public company? Jorn Lyseggen: Yes. I was a public CEO and experienced all the exciting stuff that it entails. After a while, I got eager to start a new company. I ended up starting Meltwater, which is the company I run today. Sramana Mitra: Meltwater was
Bootstrapping to $200 Million: Jorn Lyseggen, CEO of Meltwater (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What kind of clients were you working with? Were they Norwegian clients? What was the client pool at that point? Jorn Lyseggen: The client pool when I started out was Norwegian companies. We worked with the major banks. We worked with the major publishing houses and helped newspapers to create an online version