How Not To Finance Your Company: TalkPoint CEO Nick Balletta (Part 4)

Sramana: What was the process of building NextVenue? Was Goldman your first customer? Nick Balletta: CNBC was technically our first customer because we had a take back agreement with them. Morgan Stanley and Goldman were the first who clients we had.

How Not To Finance Your Company: TalkPoint CEO Nick Balletta (Part 3)

Sramana: What was the story behind iBeam? Why were they so interested in acquiring your company? Nick Balletta: iBeam Broadcasting was involved with media entertainment. They had a similar concept as Akamai with an edge cache network except instead of using terrestrial distribution they used satellite distribution. When they write the book on Silicon Valley

Read Full Article »

How Not To Finance Your Company: TalkPoint CEO Nick Balletta (Part 2)

Sramana: What was your strategy to grow since you were undercapitalized and were not finding an abundance of investors?  Nick Balletta: A former colleague of mine at MFS Communications named Doug Hickey was the CEO of a Global Center which had a similar business model but they were on the west coast. Global Center was

Read Full Article »

Child Entrepreneur David Koretz, Now CEO of Mykonos Software (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What did you charge Bertelsmann for that deal and what does your product cost today? David Koretz: We charged them very little because we really wanted the reference. Our product is an enterprise product. We start at 25 thousand dollars and it can range up to 150,000 dollars. Large organizations may have multiple

Read Full Article »

How Not To Finance Your Company: TalkPoint CEO Nick Balletta (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Nick is CEO of TalkPoint and a pioneer in the fields of unified communications and interactive webcasting. Nick launched his first company, Voyager Data Networks, in 1996 and sold it two years later. Prior he was the founder of NextVenue, a joint venture among Microsoft, NBC,

Read Full Article »

Child Entrepreneur David Koretz, Now CEO Of Mykonos Software (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is the story behind Mykonos?  David Koretz: We started seeing a problem inside BlueTie. It  was a huge issue; hackers were trying to break into our databases for a number of reasons. Some were trying to steal credit cards and others wanted to use us as a spam engine. The net effect

Read Full Article »

Child Entrepreneur David Koretz, Now CEO Of Mykonos Software (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: By this point of your career you had founded three successful companies. What are some of your tips on customer acquisition and how to build businesses?  David Koretz: There is an interesting challenge of risk. For a long time BlueTie was way out ahead of Google and Microsoft. When they began doing Web-based

Read Full Article »

Child Entrepreneur David Koretz, Now CEO Of Mykonos Software (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the concept behind the business you founded just as you went to Babson?  David Koretz: It was an information sales business. It was a Dun and Bradstreet and Axiom type of company. At the time all of those products were all offline products and we were going to take them online.