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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Having Fun At The Cusp Of Technology And Entertainment: Phunware CEO Alan Knitowski (Part 4)

Sramana: What business model did you finally arrive at after working with Discovery and seeing your reputation soar? Alan Knitowski: We started doing a lot of partner models. During the first 18 months of our business, 90% of the business was done off the partner model. We would co-invest with our customers, we would do

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Having Fun At The Cusp Of Technology And Entertainment: Phunware CEO Alan Knitowski (Part 3)

Sramana: Who were the early adopters of your technology, and how did you gain traction during your first few years? Alan Knitowski: The trigger point for us was when we won the Myth Busters opportunity with Discovery Communications. That was our first large marquee brand. We competed head to head with Digital Chocolate, Electronic Arts,

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