Sramana: What was your experience at the IT exhibition like? Abhishek Rungta: The first booth I saw had some problems going on. They were a modem based company, but the staff in that booth had very little education and did not want to be very active in helping to sell the modems. I went to
Abhishek Rungta is a serial entrepreneur and the CEO of Indus Net, a digital design services firm based in Kolkata that employs more than 500 people. This story is an example of emerging entrepreneurship from Kolkata, India. Abhishek recieved his bachelors in commerce in accountancy, graduating with honors from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata. He has
Sramana: What are your thoughts on the family ties with the business? Sabrina Parsons: My husband works at the business, and I agree that you have to keep business and personal relationships as separate as possible. One of the things I love about the family business is that I feel it allows me flexibility in
Sramana: Did you take a revenue hit from 2007 to 2009? Sabrina Parsons: We took a small hit, but it was not that much. We really focused on our core strengths online. We did not start building the new SaaS application at the time that we wanted to simply because we did not have the
Sramana: In 2001 the market crashed, which impacted a lot of businesses. What did you do when you saw the trend annual revenue increases for your business stop and move the other way? Tim Berry: I waited too long to do anything. We dropped five salaries on the same day a few months later. I
Sramana: How were customers finding you? How did you generate all of those downloadable sales? Tim Berry: At that point it was a nice convergence of retail and web. We were buoyed by good reviews in magazines like PC World, Entrepreneur, and Inc. As the web grew, those reviews became links. We had a full-time
Sramana: When did you actually start making a real business out of the software? Tim Berry: This really is one of those “darkest moments before dawn” stories. By 1994 the template business had failed in retail. We had a $250,000 liability for returns. We had boxes and boxes of software coming back to us, and
Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software, and he is also the originator of plan-as-you-go business planning. He writes at Planning, Startups, Stories, one of the most popular small business blogs. Sabrina Parsons has served as the CEO of Palo Alto Software since 2007. Prior to this role she co-founded a