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HOT TOPICS
- 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
Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 4)
Andy Gotshalk: We started the business in 2008 and raised a little bit of money. Pretty soon, we became profitable. From 2008 to 2012, we grew our revenue from that million dollar starting point up close to $8 million or $9 million. Sramana Mitra: From $7 million starting point, you said? Andy Gotshalk: From $1 million.
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Not all categories of e-commerce have very slim margins. We’ve got great stories of bootstrapped e-commerce companies. I think in your case, pet foods doesn’t have a lot of margin. Joe Speiser: It doesn’t. When we started, the gross margins on pet food were actually very high. But it’s the shipping that takes
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ensighten CEO Josh Manion (Part 1)
Josh is a fellow MIT alum, and a fellow believer in the tried and true methodology that we espouse in 1M/1M: Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later. Josh raised his Series A with $5M in revenue. The company today is growing at 150% year-over-year. Wonderful story! Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning of
Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 3)
Andy Gotshalk: This technology was invented at the University of Utah, so our company is in Salt Lake City because of that. There was another professor at the University of Utah who had a strong business mind, which you don’t find too often. He was heavily involved in developing new advanced parts of the same technology and
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 3)
Joe Speiser: In 2005, we were a very profitable business and were scaling quickly. We had 50 to 60 employees at that time. This was my first large business, so I felt that we needed help. We needed some outside experience to guide us on how to scale this company. We brought on private equity. We
Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: Given that the market is $45 billion, there’s obviously a huge amount of head room to build a larger business here. Could you have grown a lot faster? Are there levers that you could push? I’m not saying that you should grow faster. I’m asking out of intellectual curiosity. Tim Hentschel: There definitely
Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 2)
Andy Gotshalk: I also started taking some classes and thought about the idea of going to business school full-time. I never went back to business school so to this day, I still don’t have an MBA. I did take some key classes along the way, which provided a good foundation for me. The biggest thing
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: You started this in 2000? Joe Speiser: We started the deal sites in early 1999. Sramana Mitra: This was bootstrapped at that point? Joe Speiser: Yes, there were no VCs. These businesses were profitable in the first few months. If we weren’t able to make money in the first few months, we’d move