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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
Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Why do these people want to join your company instead of doing research? What are you seeing as the driver for getting these people? Andy Gotshalk: I think it’s a personality type. Most PhD’s get their PhD and want to continue in academics and research, but there are people that want to have,
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I understand what you’re saying. You had a large audience on Facebook and you wanted to do content marketing to that audience and drive the traffic towards a different site, which you would then monetize with Google AdSense. Is that what you’re saying? Joe Speiser: Almost. Before we made
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ensighten CEO Josh Manion (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: She’s also from the Midwest? Josh Manion: Yes, she’s from the Chicago area. We settled around Chicago in the western suburbs. I took a quick job with a network technology bar. That didn’t work out very well. That was nine months of craziness. Their business wasn’t doing well in the post dot-com world.
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