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
Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting strategically in how you’ve navigated the story so far? How many customers do you have now? Vincent Yang: I think we have four or five dozen customers. The growth rate is actually pretty fast. Sramana Mitra: What’s the pricing model? What’s the business model? Vincent Yang: The core of
Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to Scale: Taso Du Val, CEO of Toptal (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What is the business model? Is it a commission-based business model? How do you charge? Taso Du Val: We take a percent of every single contract. Sramana Mitra: Are you still based in Budapest? Taso Du Val: No, I’m mostly based in New York and Moscow at the moment. That’s where I’m spending
Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to Scale: Taso Du Val, CEO of Toptal (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Let’s take that on a more granular basis. What year are we talking when you decided, two years in, to give up? Taso Du Val: That was probably around 2012. In 2012, we said, “Maybe we should figure something else out.” That was two years after we started the company. Sramana Mitra: Who’s
Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 5)
Vincent Yang: We use, what we call, topic modelling to analyze every single news. For example, is this company acquiring the other company? Is this news about conference sponsorship? How do we know how strong an implication is? We have no idea. That’s the point where we have to rely on machine learning. Machine learning
Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to Scale: Taso Du Val, CEO of Toptal (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: You’re more of a freelance engineering talent exchange? Taso Du Val: That’s accurate. We think of ourselves as Uber for engineers. It’s funny. A lot of companies have pitched this. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go from there. At 25, this is what you decided you wanted to do. How did you get the business
Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: I’m going to start asking you very deep questions because I did a startup in the sales lead generation area back in 1997. It used NLP and the whole AI stream. It was a bit early. It was well before the Internet had completely established itself. I know a lot about this area
Bootstrapping to $300 Million: Faisal Husain, CEO of Synechron (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about your thinking around that. It sounds like there’s a philosophy around being self-financed. You must be getting lots of calls from private equity all the time. Faisal Husain: Yes, we’ve been getting calls for several years. I have met all of them and am on fairly good terms with them. In
Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to Scale: Taso Du Val, CEO of Toptal (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page. There’s a lot of controversy around whether virtual teams scale. Taso Du Val has scaled a sizeable business using a virtual team. Read on to learn more. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal entrepreneurial journey.