Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So, talk to me about the various business models. Is it the regular one – the college counseling one where you are hiring mentors or college counselors by the hour, and they’re being paired with the families that are seeking guidance?

Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like it’s a two-sided managed marketplace. What’s the business model? How much are you paying the counselors? How does this work out?

Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: That’s interesting because you had already validated that there was a market for what you were offering. One of the things that I don’t like about demo days at all is that a company just goes into an accelerator with no validation, and within three months has to go in front of investors

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Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: And what did you end up doing to address that itch? Hanmei Wu: Well, it wasn’t very planned out, to be honest. I was still quite young, only a few years out of college. I was just kind of doing it on my own at first, maybe just charging an hourly amount. I

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Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu (Part 1)

EdTech is notoriously difficult to build at venture scale. Hanmei is doing it.

Building an AI Platform Company for Real-Time Applications: Vantiq CEO Marty Sprinzen (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk to me a bit about your go-to-market strategy? I understand the system integrator part is straightforward. You do partnerships with system integrators who build on top of your platform. When you’re choosing to work with startups or product companies who are building their products on your platform, how do you

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Building an AI Platform Company for Real-Time Applications: Vantiq CEO Marty Sprinzen (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: “Operating system” isn’t the right term. Here’s my two cents—during the cloud era, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) became a well-understood concept.

Building an AI Platform Company for Real-Time Applications: Vantiq CEO Marty Sprinzen (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: My thesis is that the best approach to build truly serious, complex systems leveraging all the capabilities of AI—whether it’s generative AI, agent-based AI, or others—is to go to market as an IP-plus-services company. Pick domains to focus on and develop deep domain expertise. That, I believe, is one of the most effective

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