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HOT TOPICS
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
How An Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapped to $5M: RuffleButts CEO Amber Schaub and COO Mark Schaub (Part 2)
Sramana: You had the intuition to react to something that a retail salesperson was giving you. What did you do next? How did you go about setting up your business? Amber Schaub: My first step was to go back to Mark and share my idea. I also had to get the trademark, which cost $400. I
How An Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapped to $5M: RuffleButts CEO Amber Schaub and COO Mark Schaub (Part 1)
RuffleButts is a perfect story on how to bootstrap with a paycheck. Amber Schaub started RuffleButts, a children’s apparel company, in March of 2007, backed by her husband’s full-time job. He later joined in 2010 as the COO after the company had gained traction. Sramana: Let’s start at the very beginning of each of your
Bootstrapping with Services in India: Srishtisoft CEO Ajay Sharma (Part 5)
Sramana: What was the size of the healthcare team when the companies split? Ajay Sharma: The healthcare side had grown to 50 personnel. Today, we have around 145 people on the team. We were generating around $500,000 in revenue during our beta phase. Sramana: Was that revenue earned from Indian customers or global customers? Ajay
Bootstrapping with Services in India: Srishtisoft CEO Ajay Sharma (Part 4)
Sramana: I don’t see what risk they were afraid of. You were financing the company with your own cash. The engineers were not taking any risks. They were just there earning their salary. Ajay Sharma: Some of them thought that we were not going to be able to pay their salary. At that time, the
Bootstrapping with Services in India: Srishtisoft CEO Ajay Sharma (Part 3)
Sramana: You had three verticals; media companies, healthcare companies, and finance companies. Which vertical did you decide to focus on when it was time to build a product, and why? Ajay Sharma: When we looked at the financial companies, we realized that it was a market area that we understood well, but we also recognized
Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: What would you say are the key milestones that you have accomplished, based on almost four years of being in business? Matt Pfeil: From my perspective, I think that open source as a business is really hard because you create something as an open source project that you don’t own. You throw up
Bootstrapping with Services in India: Srishtisoft CEO Ajay Sharma (Part 2)
Sramana: What were the primary sectors that you supported? Ajay Sharma: We did a lot of application integration work for healthcare companies, media companies, and financial companies. Those were our three primary verticals. In 2004, we ran into some challenges. In fact, the period between 2004 and 2005 was challenging for most Indian services companies. At
Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about what happened with that money? What were the Series B milestones? What were you able to accomplish? How did the product come together? Jonathan Ellis: When we were pitching Series B, we had the blueprint of what we wanted to build for DataStax Enterprise. We knew that we wanted