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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
Serial Bootstrapper: Oversee and Manage Founder Fred Hsu (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: What do you want to do? You’ve had one successful exit. You’re in a financially comfortable position. You’ve built a second company that is also bootstrapped and very profitable. You’re still fairly young. What do you want to do with your business? How are you thinking about your choices and options now? Fred
Successful Pivot to $5M in Revenue from Chicago: Cohesive Networks CEO Patrick Kerpan (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: You said you pivoted and there was one product that you had to sell and the other product people wanted to buy. Talk a little bit more about how you proceeded from when you hit that realization? How did you move? How did you take advantage of the market pull that you discovered?
Serial Bootstrapper: Oversee and Manage Founder Fred Hsu (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: What are the milestones of this business? By how much did it scale? How fast did it scale? What kind of strategy did you follow to make it grow? Fred Hsu: What we wanted to do at first was to basically get a good sense of the market and establish a few key
Successful Pivot to $5M in Revenue from Chicago: Cohesive Networks CEO Patrick Kerpan (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Let me understand a couple of things. You talked a bit about Boards and about lightly capitalized company. Can you explain to me what the capitalization of the company is? Patrick Kerpan: The corporation is Cohesive Flexible Technologies Corporation. It’s a C-Corp. It owns two limited liability companies. One has all the image
Serial Bootstrapper: Oversee and Manage Founder Fred Hsu (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: In 2009, you were out. What did you do next? Fred Hsu: I moved out of LA. I married and had two kids. I raised them for a couple of years and got the entrepreneur itch again. Then in about 2010, I met up with an old college friend called Kai. He was
Successful Pivot to $5M in Revenue from Chicago: Cohesive Networks CEO Patrick Kerpan (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: What year did you quit Borland? Patrick Kerpan: It was sometime in early 2006. I was going to do an excellent year off. After about two weeks of me reorganizing household processes, my wife said, “You’ve got to get an office outside of the house because you’re driving us all crazy.” The co-founder of
Serial Bootstrapper: Oversee and Manage Founder Fred Hsu (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: How many people did you need to make this equation work? Fred Hsu: We had a peak of about 225 employees across three or four locations. Sramana Mitra: What function required a lot of people? At some level, it sounds like if you’re doing all this by technology, it’s not probably that people-intensive
Successful Pivot to $5M in Revenue from Chicago: Cohesive Networks CEO Patrick Kerpan (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: It sounds like that company was bootstrapped because it’s unfinanceable given the landscape of the time? Patrick Kerpan: What we find hard for bootstrapped companies is, ultimately if you have a mixed model and you have family, friends, and angel investors, those are discreet investors. They’re not portfolio investors. When you run into a