Bootstrapping a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 3)

Sramana: What specifically did you do when you launched ChaiOne? Who was your first customer? Gaurav Khandelwal: I was dating a girl at the time who is now my wife. She was working at Microsoft and called me on a Friday night frantic. Her boss needed something done by Monday morning and it was something

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Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In the case of Google, they have web self-service advertisement capabilities like Google CPC. If I, as a small business, want to advertise on Google, I can go to Google’s website and set it up to do that advertising. Do you have that in place as well? Benoît l’Archevêque: Yes. We call that

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Bootstrapping a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 2)

Sramana: Paying off all of your college debt is not a bad exit from your first company! Gaurav Khandelwal: I agree that it was very timely. It also gave me a taste for entrepreneurship. After I graduated, I went to work for a consulting firm in New York. I quickly found out that I could

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Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 4)

Benoît l’Archevêque: There are three revenue models in Azzimov: advertising when you search, the lead generation system that I just explained, and the affiliate model. When someone buys, there’s a percentage take off that. Put that aside. Take that business model, but apply it to mobile.

Bootstrapping a $7 Million Company in Houston: Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO of ChaiOne (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  This is an interesting strategy discussion about a company that is doing substantial revenue based on services, has productized a piece of its services business that is also generating over a million in revenue. Where next? Sramana: Gaurav, let’s go to the beginning of your story.

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Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 3)

Benoît l’Archevêque: I’ll give you a very quick example. If I do a search on Italian, red, and car, you see a Ferrari. What we have created is a new dynamic knowledge graph where we only store words once. If I have 500,000 bottles of wine, I’m not going to store the word wine 500,000

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Crossing the Desert, Hitting the Jackpot: Taboola CEO Adam Singolda (Part 7)

Sramana: Can you give us some use cases as examples? Adam Singolda: One example that I really like is Ancestry.com. It is a brilliant example of the future. Today 70% of the $110 billion in advertising are ROI performance-driven spends. The likelihood of that changing is very small. Ancenstry.com offers subscription services and they are

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Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year was this? Benoît l’Archevêque: It was in 1990. One Thursday morning, I lost my job. That noon, I said, “Nobody else will fire me again in my life.” So I started my own advertising agency that’s still running. People were coming to me with their problems thinking that only advertising could

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