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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
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
Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: What did you do with that? What was the next milestone after you got that money? Tim Hentschel: We just used it for growth. We eventually bought our own office space in San Diego and started hiring some people. Sramana Mitra: Why would you buy office space? Tim Hentschel: There was a real estate
Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Your thesis on it was that it had to be manually kept up to speed? Rakesh Gupta: No, not manually. It has to be efficiently collected but certainly not in the fashion of crowdsourcing. It’s about collecting it in the right way and verifying it independently. Sramana Mitra: So you verify it other
Bootstrapping Using Services: eMazzanti CEO Carl Mazzanti (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: In terms of your current business, what percentage of that is selling your own product versus selling other people’s products? Carl Mazzanti: 60% to 70% is our own. Sramana Mitra: But Infrastructure-as-a-Service, right? Carl Mazzanti: Let me answer your first question. Your first question is what percentage of it is selling your own
Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: Before we go to the post two-year bootstrapping phase, what did you achieve? You launched a website. You started getting customers. How did you get customers? How did the customers find you? Tim Hentschel: It wasn’t that hard in those days. The Internet was new. Blogs were just beginning to become popular. I
Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What data were you collecting and what was the process of collecting that data? Rakesh Gupta: Any marketing activity in any company actually falls into three or four different kinds of marketing. One is, people using the phone to reach people. People are using email to reach people or people are doing door-to-door