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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
Bootstrapping with Services in India: Srishtisoft CEO Ajay Sharma (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Bootstrapping with service, then building two products, then splitting up the company into two, and finally, scaling a sizable product company – not the kind of stories we hear often from Indian entrepreneurs. This story is a rare window into the journey of a group of
Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about the business model from that time? What were you charging? What were the deal sizes and so forth? Jonathan Ellis: When we were first starting the company, we had a potential $80,000 deal. I told Matt, “You know if we can get a few deals like this, we might
Building a Retail Business in India: Manish Sharma, CEO of Printo (Part 7)
Sramana: What was your next step? Was your first store a proof of concept to raise more money? Manish Sharma: I had enough money to do something else, but not enough for an entirely new shop. I decided to put up a smaller shop inside a larger store. I clearly identified the demand and need
Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Let’s come back to the pitch to Lightspeed based on which you raised your Series A. How did you evolve from there? How did you build the business? Matt Pfeil: We built out an engineering team for both the core open source project as well as continued to evolve OpsCenter. For practical purposes,
Building a Retail Business in India: Manish Sharma, CEO of Printo (Part 6)
Sramana: Did you fund the business with just friends and family? Manish Sharma: I did have two angel investors when I started Printo. I met them at conferences and gave them a basic elevator pitch. I was looking to raise 2 crore rupees but ended up raising 1.4 crore rupees. I did not raise a
Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Had you already moved to Silicon Valley before raising the money? This is another key question that a lot of entrepreneurs are wrestling with and making decisions on. Jonathan Ellis: Yes. It actually wasn’t an explicit condition of the funding and we actually took another 3 months or so before moving the headquarters.
Building a Retail Business in India: Manish Sharma, CEO of Printo (Part 5)
Sramana: What happened to that business? Manish Sharma: We were caught in the crash. Not a lot of people remember how fast that happened, but I definitely do! The company did not go anywhere. Sramana: What did you do after the dot com crash? Manish Sharma: We had 40 people in India at that point
Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: I am going to probe you on a couple of different points. Did you start DataStax while you were still inside of Rackspace? Jonathan Ellis: No. We were working on Cassandra at Rackspace but we started DataStax, originally called Riptano, after leaving Rackspace. Sramana Mitra: So, by the time you left Rackspace and