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Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 7)

Posted on Tuesday, May 19th

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

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Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 2)

Posted on Tuesday, May 19th

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

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 2)

Posted on Tuesday, May 19th

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

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Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 6)

Posted on Monday, May 18th

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

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Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 1)

Posted on Monday, May 18th

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?

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Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 1)

Posted on Monday, May 18th

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

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Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 5)

Posted on Sunday, May 17th

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

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Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 7)

Posted on Sunday, May 17th

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

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