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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
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
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.
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
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
Bootstrapping a Highly Profitable Company in Social Media Marketing: Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford (Part 4)
Jamie Tedford: We took a step back at that moment and thought, “We’re sitting on a tremendous amount of equity value.” We had now become, not just a strategic partner of Facebook, but we had also accessed the Twitter platform as well as LinkedIn and thought about how we could become the preeminent software for
Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page. Jeff Frieden bootstrapped Auction.com to about $180 million in revenue and profitability. Thereafter, he raised private equity financing and growth capital and is currently running a private company that is more than qualified to be a public Unicorn. The company
Bootstrapping a Highly Profitable Company in Social Media Marketing: Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: What emerged as the positioning of Brand Networks? I understand you’re helping with word-of-mouth brand networks. What was the service that they were buying? Jamie Tedford: In the early days, they were buying more of traditional marketing services agency roles. Eventually as I brought on my partner and CTO Mike Garsin, we determined
Bootstrapping a Highly Profitable Company in Social Media Marketing: Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What year did that chapter end for you? Jamie Tedford: Around 2002. I got to work with an ad agency called Arnold Worldwide. I worked with a lot of really big brands. The brand that really got me excited was Volkswagen. I learned a lot of about traditional advertising at that time. I