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HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- 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 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
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.