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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 a $10M Creative Marketplace: Envato Founder Couple Collis and Cyan Ta’eed (Part 2)
Sramana: Did you start a marketplace for photography or for flash files? Collis Ta’eed: Selling Flash on a photography site did not make a lot of sense. It was not meeting our needs, but we were able to see enough of the Flash files selling that we could tell there was indeed customer demand. We
Bootstrapping a $10M Creative Marketplace: Envato Founder Couple Collis and Cyan Ta’eed (Part 1)
Collis and Cyan Ta’eed are the founders of Envato, an online creative marketplace. They founded Envato together after having ran a freelance design agency together out of Australia. Collis studied math and science while Cyan earned her degree in design. Sramana: Let’s start at the beginning of your personal stories. What leads up to Envato?
Funding Working Capital for Small Businesses: Kabbage CEO Marc Gorlin (Part 7)
Sramana: In your industry there must be issues around the APIs of various payment infrastructures and data systems. Some are easier to tie into now; for example, you can tie into PayPal via an API and run your algorithms on that data. Is that becoming the standard? Marc Gorlin: It is tremendously helpful to have
Funding Working Capital for Small Businesses: Kabbage CEO Marc Gorlin (Part 6)
Sramana: What has been the financing structure of your business? Where does the capital come from, and how did you put the pieces together to create this business? Marc Gorlin: It has been different at different times. In many ways it was harder to raise our first $25,000 than it was to raise our last
Funding Working Capital for Small Businesses: Kabbage CEO Marc Gorlin (Part 5)
Sramana: How many customers do you have, and what is the nature of their use of Kabbage? Marc Gorlin: We have north of 65,000 customers. Not all of them are active at one time. We put out north of 30,000 advances. That is one of the things that is unique about our platform. You have
Funding Working Capital for Small Businesses: Kabbage CEO Marc Gorlin (Part 4)
Sramana: What is the formula for calculating how much money people can get against their recievables? Marc Gorlin: That is part of our secret sauce. However, it takes into account various data sources and different sources have different values. Nobody, unlike any other financial institution, gets turned down solely based on their credit score. We
Funding Working Capital for Small Businesses: Kabbage CEO Marc Gorlin (Part 3)
Sramana: What did you do after VerticalOne? Marc Gorlin: I went back to the recruiting firm I had, and I also helped a bunch of startups in the interim. I also looked at deals in Atlanta for some investors as well. It was a good time to focus on family and real estate and do
Funding Working Capital for Small Businesses: Kabbage CEO Marc Gorlin (Part 2)
Sramana: When you had those initial conversations, what was the consensus on identifying a company-building opportunity? Marc Gorlin: The concept was to take a worldwide known brand, PGP, and turn it into a product that corporations could buy to protect their digitally sensitive information. It was not something that you would normally see done because