Building a Fat Startup: Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Your point is well-taken but you have to be able to afford it. You’re starting with a $7 million Series A. Not all entrepreneurs have the luxury of starting with a $7 million Series A. Sunny Gupta: I understand. I have myself been there when I started, which was literally two years prior

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Comment-Selling on Facebook: Smocked Auctions Founders Amy Laws and Nicole Brewer (Part 6)

Sramana: So now in addition to your auctions, you are also offering traditional e-commerce on your website? Nicole Brewer: Yes. We still have our auctions as well. Sramana: What infrastructure do you use to complete your auctions? Is that still custom software? Nicole Brewer: We have a partner that we are using. We post a

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Building a Fat Startup: Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta (Part 4)

Sunny Gupta: Then came the fund raising. Greylock and Madrona were my prime investors. I started talking to them as I was validating the idea in the summer of 2007. I think their perspective was, “We have a lot of faith in you. Great teams can take a bad idea and make it into a

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Comment-Selling on Facebook: Smocked Auctions Founders Amy Laws and Nicole Brewer (Part 5)

Sramana: What percentage of the business is girls clothing versus boys clothing? Nicole Brewer: About 70% to 30%. Girl moms definitely shop more than the boy moms. You can do a lot more with a girl. Sramana: When you decided to move to a more automated payment process, how did you manage that decision process?

Building a Fat Startup: Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You got this input from the CIO of Goldman Sachs. Did you go talk to other CIOs in the financial sector or other CIOs in general? Sunny Gupta: Yes. I came home back to Seattle. On a long flight back, I thought, “This is the most ridiculous idea I’ve heard because it’s too

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Comment-Selling on Facebook: Smocked Auctions Founders Amy Laws and Nicole Brewer (Part 4)

Sramana: How much overstock inventory did you have to buy in terms of dollars? Amy Laws: We probably bought $30,000 of inventory. Sramana: What kind of markups were you getting on that $30,000 overstock inventory?

Building a Fat Startup: Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta (Part 2)

Sunny Gupta: I left IBM and joined a local Seattle-based venture company called Performant as a business guy. I stayed there for 18 months and sold that business to Mercury Interactive. Once I went to Mercury, I transitioned into a product role. That was incredible because a lot of my learnings around being close to

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Comment-Selling on Facebook: Smocked Auctions Founders Amy Laws and Nicole Brewer (Part 3)

Sramana: What volume of merchandise were you able to push during that first sale? Nicole Brewer: We sold 700 units during our first sample sale. That amounted to around $20,000 of business. Once that sale was over we realized we had a lot of fun and we wanted to do it again, but without having

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