Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Are the real estate agents part of this marketplace or are you working with buyers and sellers, and the brokers are out of the picture? Jeff Frieden: The brokers are in the picture. Sramana Mitra: The people who are actually handling the transactions are still the brokers. Jeff Frieden: We go directly to

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Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 1)

Frank and his co-founders have built a sizeable bootstrapped business in North Carolina. Read on to learn what has worked for Ateb and what you can learn from them. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your story. Where do you come from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of

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Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The entity that you sold to private equity was still REDC? Jeff Frieden: That’s right. Sramana Mitra: You bought the Auction.com domain name and rebranded your original entity as Auction.com? Jeff Frieden: Correct. Sramana Mitra: It seems you’re doing hybrid auctions but you’ve expanded from residential distressed properties to commercial distressed properties.

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You were still focusing only on real estate? Jeff Frieden: Only on real estate. Then the market crashed in 2007. We were able to pivot very quickly to help out institutions like large banks that had a tsunami of foreclosures coming in when the market blew up. In 2007, we held our first

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Bootstrapping a Highly Profitable Company in Social Media Marketing: Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford (Part 6)

Jamie Tedford: Acquisition was strategically important for us because it completed what we thought was an important part of our story and what the market was telling us, which is that brands and agencies wanted to work from one platform. There’s this converged media phrase that had taken hold at that time. We really believed

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Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You bought these parcels of land and you ran this auction. What was the outcome of the auction? Jeff Frieden: We made a million dollars in one day. Sramana Mitra: Oh, wow! Terrific! Jeff Frieden: There were thousands of people there betting competitively on this land. It was the 1987 to 1988 timeframe.

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Bootstrapping a Highly Profitable Company in Social Media Marketing: Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: We are huge fans of bootstrapping entrepreneurs, so congratulations on doing that. What scale did you reach before you raised the private equity round? Jamie Tedford: We were almost a hundred people. We were very profitable and had 50% EBITDA margins. When we decided that we were going to talk to the private equity

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Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How long did this go on? How many years did you run this? Jeff Frieden: From 1980 to 1983. We once hired an auctioneer to come in one day for an auction of these televisions that we had in containers sitting out in the parking lot. We actually sold more merchandise in that one

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