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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 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
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
Building an Online Real Estate Business From Brazil: Brian Requarth, CEO of VivaReal (Part 7)
Sramana: In terms of completing the story, bringing us up to 2014, there are few interesting questions I would like to ask. What are some of the other major strategic moves that you made? Brian Requarth: Let me summarize one thing, say financing. I organized the financing in several buckets. After pooling from friends and family, in the first
Building an Online Real Estate Business From Brazil: Brian Requarth, CEO of VivaReal (Part 6)
Sramana: By the time he invested in your business, had he already sold the business in England? Brian Requarth: Yes, he already had an exit in 2007, three weeks before the financial crisis. He was 27 years old. He sold it for a lot of money and when he came down to Colombia, I told him
Building an Online Real Estate Business From Brazil: Brian Requarth, CEO of VivaReal (Part 5)
Sramana: Tell me more about financing, what was the financing strategy that you followed in the company? Brian Requarth: We decided to bootstrap for a long time. Sramana: How long did you bootstrap? Brian Requarth: We started in 2007. We didn’t have cash flow to support the expansion to Brazil in 2009. In 2010, my family invested a little
Building an Online Real Estate Business From Brazil: Brian Requarth, CEO of VivaReal (Part 4)
Sramana: How long did you do a critical mass of a particular listing such that the marketplace on the other side would become interesting? Brian Requarth: During that time, we didn’t have enough listings from customers that we were offering free trials to. So we actually built a robot to go out and get the listings
Building an Online Real Estate Business From Brazil: Brian Requarth, CEO of VivaReal (Part 3)
Sramana: What did you find to take feedback from him? Brian Requarth: He was just Brazilian. Sramana: That’s it? That’s the qualification, that he was Brazilian? Brian Requarth: The other qualification was that his family had a simple construction company. It had nothing to do with home-building, but I thought he perhaps knows something about real estate market.
Building an Online Real Estate Business From Brazil: Brian Requarth, CEO of VivaReal (Part 2)
Sramana: What’s the name of your German friend? Brian Requarth: His name is Thomas Floracks. Sramana: So Thomas was doing the technical work, you were doing the sales and marketing work in this little web development business that you put together? Brian Requarth: Yes. He built the first couple of websites. I would sell the