Equity Financing from Customers: Modernizing Medicine CEO Daniel Cane, Boca Raton, Florida (Part 2)

Sramana: Let’s touch on a few highlights of the Blackboard story. You started building pages for professors, and then other universities started contacting you. Did you finish college or did you drop out to do this? Daniel Cane: I didn’t drop out; I finished by the skin of my teeth! I graduated from Cornell with

Read Full Article »

Equity Financing from Customers: Modernizing Medicine CEO Daniel Cane, Boca Raton, Florida (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Daniel is president and CEO of south Florida–based Modernizing Medicine, Inc., a healthcare company that aims to change the way medical information is created, consumed, and used to increase efficiency, lower costs, and improve outcomes. Daniel has a BS from Cornell University where, as an undergraduate,

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping to Exit in Israel: Eli Sasson, Founder of Minicom (Part 7)

Sramana: How long did it take for people to start engaging you once you had decided to sell the company? Eli Sasson: It is hard to say because we did not start the process at a particular date and time. We gradually moved into the decision and gradually made it known. I would say that

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping to Exit in Israel: Eli Sasson, Founder of Minicom (Part 6)

Sramana: How did you manage your rapid growth from $5 million to $25 million? Eli Sasson: We had to expand the management layer of the company. That was the key first step. We added additional information systems to enhance reporting. We had to really build out all aspects of the company.

Bootstrapping to Exit in Israel: Eli Sasson, Founder of Minicom (Part 5)

Sramana: When did you make the pivot into the KVM market? Eli Sasson: We did that in the mid-1990s. From 1995 on, we were active in both the educational market and the KVM [keyboard, video and mouse] market. The KVM market ultimately emerged as the primary market. By the time we took on funding, our

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping to Exit in Israel: Eli Sasson, Founder of Minicom (Part 4)

Sramana: How did you bridge the product gap? You had built a product for PCs, and then many of your potential customers ended up using PS/2. How did you bridge the gap? Eli Sasson: Byte magazine covered the older product, but that was also at a point where we were also almost ready to release

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping to Exit in Israel: Eli Sasson, Founder of Minicom (Part 3)

Sramana: What were some of your lessons learned in those early days of forming the company? Eli Sasson: We had some unpleasant hiccups on our way. We did all of the design and product research. We based everything on the PC environment, but during the same time, IBM pushed the PS/2 very aggressively in the

Read Full Article »

Bootstrapping to Exit in Israel: Eli Sasson, Founder of Minicom (Part 2)

Sramana: Who were the first few educators who embraced the concept? During the time we are talking about, it must have been difficult to get teachers to embrace technology. Eli Sasson: We spent money and hired an industrial designer. We had a clear understanding of what we wanted. We knew what we wanted the interface

Read Full Article »