If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Today’s entrepreneurial landscape is full of serial entrepreneurs who start really young and build company after company. Some succeed and some fail. David’s four companies have all been successful. Sramana Mitra: David, where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What’s the back story?
Sramana: What were you doing at HealthStream? Were you part of the early team in any way? Christopher Aker: I was a technical employee and I was able to go through the IPO ride while I was there. We did not make any money there. We were the last tech company to go public just
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Chris had many opportunities to raise money along the way while bootstrapping to a $60 million revenue level. Find out why he chose not to. Sramana: Chris, let’s start with the beginning of your story. Tell me where you are from and set the stage for
Sramana: You have described an IT organization that is disjointed. You have a new model, IT as a supply chain. How do you actually solve the IT problem? What are you doing for a customer that makes the transition to IT supply chain? Mohammed Farooq: We discover what any of the business units have purchased
Sramana Mitra: When did you start United Web? Tomas Gorny: In 2008. Over the years, United Web became an investment vehicle for our and other businesses. What I’m really focused on and really passionate about is the business that we do now – Nextiva. Nextiva technically started its development on the product in 2006. In
Sramana: The bottom line is that you still have a lot of marketing to do to educate enterprises about the transformations you enable. Mohammed Farooq: Yes, we do. Last year, we had a lot of work to do in this space, and this year, we are finally getting closer. People are starting to understand how
Sramana Mitra: You had web hosting, email, domains, and you had a suite of widgets that people need to build and host a web business. You were doing it all for a flat price at $7.95 a month. Tomas Gorny: That’s correct. The magic was really in the last statement. The control panel and the widgets
Sramana: Let’s talk about your financing strategy. You raised a round in 2012 and another in 2013. How many customers did you have by the time you raised your first round? Mohammed Farooq: We had three customers. Texas was our largest customer because they had six different agencies, so it’s almost like we had six