Building a Healthcare Company from Rhode Island: ShapeUp CEO Rajiv Kumar (Part 5)

Sramana: What were some of the interesting challenges you faced when raising VC money? Rajiv Kumar: What Brad and I decided to do while we were raising our venture round was to return to school and get our medical degrees. We felt that we should be able to do that and have a growing, successful

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Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You were at Siebel through that acquisition? Brad Peters: No, I wasn’t. You could see the writing on the wall. Analytics was exploding. We were doing really well, but the rest of the company was not doing so well. It was actually shrinking. You could tell that the company was on a collision

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Building a Healthcare Company from Rhode Island: ShapeUp CEO Rajiv Kumar (Part 4)

Sramana: Was there any kind of targeting or segmenting that you were doing when approaching enterprises? Rajiv Kumar: Absolutely. We had a very specific approach for employee wellness. We learned that it was an uphill battle for companies that did not believe in employee wellness to begin with. If they were not already investing in

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Buliding a Venture Scale Analytics Platform Company: Birst CEO, Brad Peters (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Birst’s beginnings had many of the same principles that we espouse in 1M/1M, engaging customers in paying relationships early on being the foremost. Today, the company has raised four rounds of venture capital, and is growing fast as a regular Silicon Valley-style pre-IPO company. Sramana Mitra:

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Building a Healthcare Company from Rhode Island: ShapeUp CEO Rajiv Kumar (Part 3)

Sramana: Is that when you started ShapeUp as a for-profit company? Rajiv Kumar: I got together with one of my colleagues, Dr. Brad Weinberg, who was in the same program as I was. He was a technologist and a self-taught computer programmer. He decided to help me build a software platform that would organize this

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Serial Entrepreneur, Self-Financing to $50 Million: GoGrid CEO, John Keagy (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: So you have multiple technology stacks available as a service from your company for people looking for hosted Big Data platforms and you work with these platform vendors to offer them as a service.

Building a Healthcare Company from Rhode Island: ShapeUp CEO Rajiv Kumar (Part 2)

Sramana: What time-frame are we talking about when you were conceptualizing ShapeUp? Rajiv Kumar: This was in 2005. Sramana: That is when social media was starting to get introduced to the world at scale. Rajiv Kumar: It was. Facebook was created in 2004. The concept behind ShapeUp was less about technology and more about approach.

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Serial Entrepreneur, Self-Financing to $50 Million: GoGrid CEO, John Keagy (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In terms 0f the complexity of the R&D, how much of that was predicated on being able to get the right technical talent? There’s definitely a truth – not just a myth – that it’s harder for self-financed companies to attract the top talent. Everybody’s looking at which VC is funding the company

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