categories
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 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
Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO, Tony DiCostanzo (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: What are some of the major trends that you are tracking and building your strategy around as you’re watching the book business? Tony DiCostanzo: I think the one that’s most prevalent is the momentum that e-books are building in the market. That’s one of the reasons that we pursued and made the investment
Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 5)
Sramana: How long did it take you to launch the first version of the site? Farbod Shoraka: Once we won the money, we hired a developer and spent a few months building the first version of BloomNation.com. It was an alpha platform to give florists an idea of where we were headed. It was enough