Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How fast were you able to course correct on that? I imagine that when you saw that things were not working out, you fired the CEO. When did that happen? Frank Sheppard: Late 2003, I believe. We were probably short of bankruptcy, but like all good entrepreneurs, we were too stupid to do

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 3)

Frank Sheppard: At that time, my spouse was still with IBM, working in the retail division. She just saw some opportunity there. We agreed to bring her on board in late 1995 to see if she can develop a lot of what we were doing for the telecom industry. We were able to do that very

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Given the numbers you’ve quoted in terms of houses sold, it seems to me that you should be ready to go public at this point. Is that part of the thinking? Why or why not? What’s going on from an exit point of view? Jake Seid: Our goal is to build a big company.

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I got this. You basically had a project within IBM that IBM didn’t want to pursue. You wanted to pursue it and, with IBM’s blessing, you spun it out as a separate company? Frank Sheppard: Correct. IBM had no part in the founding of that company except to say

Read Full Article »

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

Read Full Article »

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

Read Full Article »

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

Read Full Article »