A Successful Husband-Wife Team: Moonfruit Cofounders Wendy Tan White and Joe White (Part 2)

Sramana: How much money did you put in to start up Moonfruit? Wendy Tan White: We seeded the company with our own money. I put in $50,000 to start with. Joe White: We basically worked for equity to a point of around $200,000. The first investment we received was from Bain, which put in $500,000.

A Successful Husband-Wife Team: Moonfruit Cofounders Wendy Tan White and Joe White (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Wendy Tan White is the CEO of Moonfruit, a company she cofounded with Eirik Pettersen and Joe White. Moonfruit is an on-demand website development platform that allows anyone to develop a website for any purpose in a matter of minutes. Prior to Moonfruit, Wendy worked at

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Optimizing Websites With Machine Learning: BloomReach CEO Raj De Datta (Part 7)

Sramana: You entered 2010 with a proof of concept based on pilots in a few different companies across different verticals. What came next? Raj De Datta: In 2009 we knew we were able to give companies a significant lift. We did not know how to sell our capability or how to price our capability. We

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Optimizing Websites With Machine Learning: BloomReach CEO Raj De Datta (Part 6)

Sramana: What rates of improvements do your customers see when they deploy your solution? Raj De Datta: They will see results as soon as one week. At the one-year point they should see an 80% improvement, especially in the areas of natural search.

Optimizing Websites With Machine Learning: BloomReach CEO Raj De Datta (Part 5)

Sramana: Would you give me a use case of how a company would employ BloomReach? Raj De Datta: Search is by far the most-used method to find content. People put a query into a search engine, which in turn presents information to users, who click on links to visit. From the perspective of the website

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Optimizing Websites With Machine Learning: BloomReach CEO Raj De Datta (Part 4)

Sramana: What was the result of your two year entrepreneur in residence experience? Did you emerge with a clarified approach for a new company? Raj De Datta: When I was an entrepreneur in residence I started a cloud infrastructure company. I raised 500,000 dollars from the VC firm and then we experienced the 2008 meltdown.

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Optimizing Websites With Machine Learning: BloomReach CEO Raj De Datta (Part 3)

Sramana: What happened after FirstMark was sold to PSINet? Raj De Datta: In 2001 I went to business school. I studied at Harvard until 2003. The good thing about doing everything I had done before business school is that most people I met there were confused about what they wanted to do with their lives.

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Optimizing Websites With Machine Learning: BloomReach CEO Raj De Datta (Part 2)

Sramana: What did you do after you graduated from Princeton? Raj De Datta: I was going to go to Bell Labs until by chance I met a guest speaker from Wall Street. I did not know anything about Wall Street, and I spoke with him after his talk because it was intriguing. He offered me

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