Bootstrapping a $175 Million Business with Services: TEOCO CEO Atul Jain (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What timeframe are we talking about when you were $20 million in revenue in this business? Atul Jain: About 2005 to 2006 timeframe. Sramana Mitra: A $20 million dollar business and now you have a competitor that is going belly up and you buy that competitor for cash.

How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When you were going through this whiteboarding process of what your vision of what the company wants to be when it grows up, what was the financial situation of the company? David Karandish: We were profitable. We were generating revenue. We were small, but we were doing each of those and we realized

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Mass Customization in Online Fashion E-Commerce: Indochino CEO Kyle Vucko (Part 1)

Mass customization has been the holy grail of fashion e-commerce for the longest time. Meet Kyle Vucko, CEO of Indochino, a men’s fashion company that has cracked the code. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of circumstances? Kyle

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Bootstrapping a $175 Million Business with Services: TEOCO CEO Atul Jain (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the intellectual property that you bought? From whom did you buy it? Atul Jain: It was a one-person entity. I hired a person that had a bit more telecom knowledge than I did. I asked him about what I could build and he talked about doing something in the billing reconciliation

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How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: A plan did not exist at that time? David Karandish: Answers.com was not a parallel path. We acquired Answers.com in 2011. Around 2008-2009, we did a white boarding strategy session. We brought some of the key management team members in and asked them, “If we were going to build the ultimate Internet company,

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How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 1)

You would think question and answer sites are hard to monetize. Read how David Karandish built Answers.com to be a profitable $200M+ company … Note, the much-hyped Quora doesn’t monetize at all yet. Sramana Mitra: David, let’s start with your background. Where does your story begin? What is the back-story to the Answers.com story? David Karandish:

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Bootstrapping a $175 Million Business with Services: TEOCO CEO Atul Jain (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What were you consulting on? Atul Jain: I was helping them build a system for oil trading. I had developed a certain amount of expertise in doing that, so they were happy to get my expertise to help them figure out how to go about building an integrated oil trading system. I told

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Bootstrapping a $175 Million Business with Services: TEOCO CEO Atul Jain (Part 1)

There is, of course, a myth that you cannot build a large company by bootstrapping. What a total pot of crap! Meet Atul Jain, and get your premises checked and readjusted. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where were you born, raised, and educated? Tell us a bit of the

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