categories
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
Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: What do you want to do? Is this something that you are going to accelerate by taking outside capital or do you want to remain an employee-owned organization? Tim Hentschel: Debt is so cheap. It’s 3% to 4%. People get excited about the private equity money out there. I agree that it has
Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 1)
We have covered quite a few Utah companies already like Pluralsight, InsideSales, and Steals.com. Here is another interesting entrepreneurial story out of the mini tech startup hub in Utah. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 1)
Joe bootstrapped his first digital media/ad network business to $50 million in revenue and then sold it to private equity. Later he started a second business, an e-commerce company, that he bootstrapped for a year and then raised venture capital. His third business is a spin-off within the second business that takes him back to
Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: All the business model is entirely predicated upon the hotels paying your fees and not the consumers. What are the key segments where you do business? Are we talking weddings? What are the top segments in which your business flows? Tim Hentschel: Sports teams is big for us. It’s great to have a
Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: Internet marketing is your primary channel? Rakesh Gupta: Yes. Sramana Mitra: In terms of segments and where you found the most adoption, what segments are you seeing the maximum revenue from? Rakesh Gupta: After that initial journey into financial services and insurance, what we are finding is that we have a very broad
Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Between 2005 and 2015, there’s a ten-year journey. Can you highlight for us some of the major strategic moves that really helped your business propel forward? Tim Hentschel: The years between 2005 and 2008 were very interesting because we had two competitors. One was Group Travel Planet and the other was Groupe. Groupe had the Travelocity
Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: In terms of customer acquisition, what customer base did you go after? There’s a bit of a subtlety in that question. Typically, in data services like yours, you tend to have richer data in one particular area or a few particular areas. What was that segmentation that you went with at the beginning?
Bootstrapping Using Services: eMazzanti CEO Carl Mazzanti (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: What scale are you at now? Carl Mazzanti: We’ve been in the middle of the pack of the Inc. 5000 fastest growing companies for the last five years. We hit $7 million in 2014 and we’re on track for revenue between $9 and $10 million this year. If we continue this for the next 15 years