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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 Using Services: eMazzanti CEO Carl Mazzanti (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that you were building more like a toolkit as opposed to a full blown architected product? You have a toolkit that you apply wherever similar problems crop up again. Does that describe the scenario better? Carl Mazzanti: If you look at where we are 15 years from now, the primary
Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page. Tim has built an excellent company with quite unorthodox financial engineering decisions that have played out very well for him. Read this story to learn some out-of-the-box thinking. Sramana Mitra: Where are you from? Where were your born, raised, and
Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to when you started this company. What did you do to get this off the ground? Rakesh Gupta: The first thing was to figure out, with some level of clarity, what space are you going to go after. As our dear friend in Omaha, Warren Buffett, always says, “There has
Bootstrapping Using Services: eMazzanti CEO Carl Mazzanti (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Then what’s the next milestone after moving to that Microsoft strategy or becoming a more general plumbing support beyond security? Carl Mazzanti: Shared services. Our first level shared services was email filtering. Instead of selling someone a hardware appliance, we moved that to what everyone now calls the cloud. Back then, it was
Raising $20 Million from Angel Investors: Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele Contorer (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Hats off to you that you were able to pull together this amount of angel capital because that’s a tough thing to do. Lori Steele Contorer: It was a tough thing to do and as I said, I’m not sure it was the right thing to do. Now, we’re in a very
Building a Founding Team Financed Business from Omaha, Nebraska: InfoFree CEO Rakesh Gupta (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What happened to that company in the end? Rakesh Gupta: That company became part of a large corporation. It’s still part of Reed Elsevier. They still have whole group called Reed Travel Group (RTG). Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at Reed? Rakesh Gupta: I was there for three years. Sramana Mitra:
Bootstrapping Using Services: eMazzanti CEO Carl Mazzanti (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What was it about WatchGuard that made you choose them at that point? Carl Mazzanti: WatchGuard had been around for 11 years at that point. Sramana Mitra: They were already quite a while into the market? Carl Mazzanti: They were established, yes. Sramana Mitra: That’s why you chose them. You thought you could
Raising $20 Million from Angel Investors: Everyone Counts CEO Lori Steele Contorer (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: You’re not going to become a billion-dollar revenue company in two years. Lori Steele Contorer: No, the next presidential cycle is beyond 2016. The next one will be the 2020 election. Sramana Mitra: You said you originally raised some angel money and then acquired the Australian company for stock. Given that you had