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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
Building India’s Blue Nile: CaratLane CEO Mithun Sacheti (Part 6)
Sramana: Essentially you are walking a tightrope with your messaging. People need to know that you have the best price, but they can’t be perceived as being cheap for shopping at CaratLane. Is that fair? Mithun Sacheti: Yes. I think we will hit the best price solely because of the number of vendors we have.
Building India’s Blue Nile: CaratLane CEO Mithun Sacheti (Part 5)
Sramana: By 2009 you had started going deeper into the supply chain and were reaching cutters directly. How did 2009 end for your business? Mithun Sacheti: We ended at around $3 million in revenue. We had around 90,000 diamonds listed at that point. We had really developed our international pipeline by then. If at any
Building India’s Blue Nile: CaratLane CEO Mithun Sacheti (Part 4)
Sramana: What kind of capital requirements did you have to get the business launched? Mithun Sacheti: We budgeted $500,000 between the two of us. We were determined to launch the business once we had spent that amount regardless of where we were, and determined that once we had spent that amount, we would sit down
Building India’s Blue Nile: CaratLane CEO Mithun Sacheti (Part 3)
Sramana: How did you go about developing your diamond aggregation pipeline? Did you primarily rely on your family’s history and contacts? Mithun Sacheti: Aggregating diamond suppliers in India alone was not enough. We needed to be everywhere. We had to go deep and get inventory from Hong Kong, Israel, New York, Antwerp, and Bombay. Those
Building India’s Blue Nile: CaratLane CEO Mithun Sacheti (Part 2)
Sramana: I have followed Blue Nile for a long time. I have a friend who was an early investor there. Mithun Sacheti: What I saw from Blue Nile stuck with me for a long time. Things happen in different industries that transform the entire industry. If you really look at our industry, you will see
Building India’s Blue Nile: CaratLane CEO Mithun Sacheti (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. [Also check out my Entrepreneur Journeys book, Seed India – How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap in India] Mithun Sacheti is the founder of CaratLane, an online jeweler in India and one of the country’s leading ecommerce companies. Mithun grew up in the jewelry industry and prior to founding
Reinventing a British Company, American-Style: Steve Millard, CEO of Kognitio (Part 7)
Sramana: What is your strongest market outside of the U.S.? Steve Millard: We have a tremendous reputation in the U.K. Kognitio and Whitecross are well known, and we have around 40 customers there. We are the gold standard in analytics in that part of the world. The investment I am promising to our board is
Reinventing a British Company, American-Style: Steve Millard, CEO of Kognitio (Part 6)
Sramana: When you prospect by telesales, what lists do you have them work on? Steve Millard: Lists are generally awful and cost a lot of money. The folks we have, combined with expertise in the company, has given us a very deep Rolodex. We talk to VCs we know or customers we have done business