Building An Enterprise Software Company From Europe: President Of Neolane North America, Stephan Dietrich (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What was your financing strategy for Neolane? You said that the founders bootstrapped the company. Have you taken on any institutional investment to date? Stephan Dietrich: We started with our own money. We knew that with the dot-com crash it would be very difficult to get funding. Our team was not intimidated by

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Building An Enterprise Software Company From Europe: President Of Neolane North America, Stephan Dietrich (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In 2001, if I had been evaluating all of the marketing automation providers out there, what would have been the use case that would have made me pick Neolane? Stephan Dietrich: One of our first clients was an online brokerage firm in France. They needed to communicate effectively with their consumers about daily

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Building An Enterprise Software Company From Europe: President Of Neolane North America, Stephan Dietrich (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Did you feel that your skill sets in big data would give you a competitive advantage? Stephan Dietrich: We were fascinated by the skills we had developed around data and profiling. We knew we had the skill sets to manage large databases. Back then, large databases were 1 terabyte databases that acquired data

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Building An Enterprise Software Company From Europe: President Of Neolane North America, Stephan Dietrich (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The three of you worked together and sold your first software company. When was that? Stephan Dietrich: That software company was acquired in 1995. There are ups and downs to creating a company like that. We started it in late 1992 and sold it in 1995, but it was not a straight line.

Building An Enterprise Software Company From Europe: President Of Neolane North America, Stephan Dietrich (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Stephan Dietrich is a co-founder and the president of North America for Neolane, a provider of conversational marketing technology. He has 15 years’ experience in enterprise software and marketing expertise in the high-tech field. Previously he was president of Cubicsoft and co-founder of AGDS, which was

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Having Fun At The Cusp Of Technology and Entertainment: Phunware CEO Alan Knitowski (Part 7)

Sramana: Your early background was in hard-core networking and infrastructure. What you are doing today is very different from where you come from. Would you talk about how you navigated into this world? Alan Knitowski: Fundamentally, even though I came from those markets, we created a lot of the devices that attached to those networks.

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Having Fun At The Cusp Of Technology And Entertainment: Phunware CEO Alan Knitowski (Part 6)

Sramana: What has your run rate looked like? Alan Knitowski: We grew 33% sequentially from the third to fourth quarter of last year. That was 15 times higher than our fourth quarter of the prior year. We are maintaining a profitable and debt-free status with money in the bank. That has been wonderful.

Having Fun At The Cusp Of Technology And Entertainment: Phunware CEO Alan Knitowski (Part 5)

Sramana: You have gained a lot of experience working with media and entertainment brands. What does a typical project look like for a company in those spaces? For example, what do you do for NASCAR? Alan Knitowski: NASCAR is a very interesting use case. NASCAR.com is owned by Turner Sports, but the title sponsorship is

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