Building a Fat Startup with a Massive Patent Portfolio: Cleversafe Founder Chris Gladwin (Part 2)

Sramana: What did you do after Lockheed? Chris Gladwin: Lockheed was a very good experience because I got to learn what it meant to be a customer of technology products, particularly an enterprise customer. I essentially spent my time evaluating products. Eventually, I felt that I wanted to start building the technology instead of evaluating

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Katya Andresen, CEO of Cricket Media (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  It almost always is the case that Edtech companies don’t have solid monetization models. Cricket media is experimenting with models that are worth understanding. This interview also further elaborates on the issues raised in one of my articles, Are We In A Golden Age of Edtech?

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Building a Fat Startup with a Massive Patent Portfolio: Cleversafe Founder Chris Gladwin (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  There aren’t many sub $100 million technology companies that can boast of a strong patent portfolio. Cleversafe is that rare exception, and hence, a tremendously valuable company with robust revenue growth in a $20 billion market. Sramana: Chris, let’s start with your background. Where are you

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Bootstrapping Using Services: Krishna Kumar, CEO of AppOrchid (Part 7)

Sramana: How have you structured your technology to support these various use cases? Krishna Kumar: Our app building platform lets you build apps quickly for these various conditions. We use an agent-based model. That is a cool way of predicting human response conditions. We are mimicking the human intelligence response to different conditions and using

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Bootstrapping Using Services: Krishna Kumar, CEO of AppOrchid (Part 6)

Sramana: So your ultimate strategy is to go to market through third party consultants? Krishna Kumar: We want to empower consulting companies to run with projects based in our technology. They are not going to buy into our strategy if two things don’t happen. First, we need to have similar customers in the market that

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Building a VC-Funded Fashion E-Commerce Company: Weddington Way CEO Ilana Stern (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is your perspective on this theme that often gets discussed that there’s a bias against women in Silicon Valley. Do you buy it? Ilana Stern: It’s a hard question to answer. I think I’ve been really fortunate in fund raising, team building, and getting support from my environment. I don’t feel disadvantaged.

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Bootstrapping Using Services: Krishna Kumar, CEO of AppOrchid (Part 5)

Sramana: Do you have any proof points of your technology working and providing actionable recommendations? Krishna Kumar: We are very new and we have just started the pilot project for that use case. It is not a tried and tested method from the business method standpoint. We will be working with more established ERP vendors

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Building a VC-Funded Fashion E-Commerce Company: Weddington Way CEO Ilana Stern (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How do you assess the TAM? How big is the bridesmaid dress category? Ilana Stern: Bridesmaid dresses itself is about a $2 billion category housed within the $14 billion wedding fashion industry. Overall, the wedding industry is $100 billion. Sramana Mitra: Your growth strategy is wedding industry merchandise or collaborative e-commerce?