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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
Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland (Part 1)
Phil bootstrapped Avoka using services around an Adobe product, and then developed core IP and a product of his own at Avoka. The methodology is tried and true, and worth learning from. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the beginning of your story. Tell us where you’re from, where you were born and raised, and in
Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: Is anything else interesting in your story? I find it fascinating. It’s great that you did this from Switzerland. It’s a very interesting angle that you figured out very early on in the history of the Internet. It’s wonderful to see that. Samy Liechti: I think I have a message to all new
Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: In Switzerland, how do you market for your kind of offering? How much could you grow in Switzerland? Samy Liechti: In the socks segment, we now have 20% market share. With 20% market share, we can grow up to 30% to 35%, but we will never dominate the whole market. We started about
Aiming to Disrupt Consumer Credit: Al Goldstein, CEO of AvantCredit (Part 5)
Al Goldstein: We just focused on the things that are most critical to the business. In our case, it was building out the regulatory infrastructure from day one, and building data reporting and analytics infrastructure. There was demand because there are a lot of customers looking for lending products. As we’ve grown our business, we
Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: E-commerce has been a category where a lot of people have bootstrapped businesses to some scale. You talked about your sweet spot being this half a million to million range. A large portion of that is probably bootstrapped businesses right? Rick Wilson: Absolutely, I would say the vast majority. Sramana Mitra: What are
Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Interesting. In 2005, you said you had the biggest growth year. What kind of numbers did you do? Samy Liechti: We had 75% growth. The reason was very simple. We had won an award for customer experience in the US. I remember we had a whole bunch of PR coverage all over the
Aiming to Disrupt Consumer Credit: Al Goldstein, CEO of AvantCredit (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: When you went to market, what about the institutional partner side? Did you go to market with a set of institutional partners pre-negotiated? Al Goldstein: No, we didn’t. In these marketplaces, you have to match both sides. To get started, we lent only our own capital. We raised equity capital. We have raised
Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 6)
Rick Wilson: The trend we see there is that they want to go direct. They want to build a community around their product. I think Kickstarter has really brought that down even from the million dollar plus range to the zero dollar plus range where you can do a product video, get a personality out