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HOT TOPICS
- 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 Colombia: Ricardo Villadiego, CEO of Easy Solutions (Part 6)
Sramana: What did you do after you raised the $11 million round of funding? Ricardo Villadiego: We literally took the company global. We added a lot of resources in the US to cover it coast to coast. We added sales offices all over the country as well as an innovation center in Atlanta where we
Building a Global Technology Company from Colombia: Ricardo Villadiego, CEO of Easy Solutions (Part 5)
Sramana: What did you do with the money that you raised in your initial round? Ricardo Villadiego: After I closed our first round in April 2010 with Progressive Capital based in Medellin, Columbia, we focused on growth in Latin America. By the end of 2010, Gartner approached us because we had picked up so many
Building a Global Technology Company from Colombia: Ricardo Villadiego, CEO of Easy Solutions (Part 4)
Sramana: How many customers were involved in the early R&D and validation stage? Ricardo Villadiego: I could count the number of people on one hand. There were a maximum of 5. Sramana: That is fantastic. For an entrepreneur to get 3 to 5 solid enterprise customers for a complex system like this early on is
Building a Global Technology Company from Colombia: Ricardo Villadiego, CEO of Easy Solutions (Part 3)
Sramana: You said that you launched the company in 2006 but you had to stay with IBM for a while, so you were not able to work on the company full-time until 2009. What happened between 2006 and 2009? Ricardo Villadiego: We were searching through different technical approaches to tackle the problem. Sramana: So you
Building a Global Technology Company from Colombia: Ricardo Villadiego, CEO of Easy Solutions (Part 2)
Sramana: What was the founding concept for Easy Solutions? Ricardo Villadiego: I created Easy Solutions with my wife and my best friend from my university. When we created the company, our vision was to be the global leader in electronic fraud prevention. Sramana: Did you do this from Bogota, Columbia? Ricardo Villadiego: Yes, that is where
Building a Global Technology Company from Colombia: Ricardo Villadiego, CEO of Easy Solutions (Part 1)
We seldom see global technology companies being built out of Latin America, so what Ricardo and his team have been able to accomplish is very exciting. And to think that they are building a fraud prevention company out of Bogota, Colombia is truly impressive. Sramana: Ricardo, let’s start at the very beginning of your story.
Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 7)
Sramana: How do you validate and curate florists in a scalable manner? Farbod Shoraka: We started to use some of our funds to hire a sales team that will help us decide on who to partner with. It is not an automated process. In the end, it creates a lot of value. For BloomNation’s marketplace,
Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 6)
Sramana: What metrics did you use to solicit funding? Where were you in terms of revenue? Farbod Shoraka: We used two key metrics. This was very early stage investment, so it was really about the idea and vision. We needed to demonstrate that there was a product market fit. We were able to show that