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HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
Turning Philanthropy into a Double Bottomline Business: Ram Palaniappan, CEO of Earnin (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: How big did the company become revenue-wise? Ram Palaniappan: The company ended up with a private equity firm getting a stake in it. Subsequently, the company was acquired by a public company called Green Dot. Sramana Mitra: Was the parent company financing it when you were brought in? Ram Palaniappan: It was financed
Turning Philanthropy into a Double Bottomline Business: Ram Palaniappan, CEO of Earnin (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. When people have to live paycheck to paycheck, life can easily get unbearable. Earnin offers loans against paychecks as collateral to alleviate this incessant pressure to low income families at affordable rates. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you
Scaling to Over $10 Million From Delaware: Ye Zhang, CEO of Katabat (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Talk about the customer service value proposition. What is it that you do specifically that delivers on the customer service value proposition? Ye Zhang: We are still focused on financial institutions. Financial institutions have a lot of legacy systems behind their firewall. There will be a lot of silo’d communication components. One for
Scaling to Over $10 Million From Delaware: Ye Zhang, CEO of Katabat (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Go back to when you started with the collections value proposition with this digital marketing technology and tell me how long you did the business focused on collections agencies. How far did you get by selling to that class of customers? How much revenue were you able to build up? Ye Zhang: We had
Scaling to Over $10 Million From Delaware: Ye Zhang, CEO of Katabat (Part 2)
Ye Zhang: Very quickly, we found that it’s a very tedious job to set up a collection agency because of a lot of compliance rules. Compliance rules are very different in different states and cities. We were required to acquire licenses at individual state level. Doing that would take a lot of manpower. It was
Scaling to Over $10 Million From Delaware: Ye Zhang, CEO of Katabat (Part 1)
The state of Delaware has been working with 1Mby1M to stimulate entrepreneurship. Here is a wonderful success story from the region. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Ye Zhang: I was born in China. I
Bootstrap First in Europe, Raise Money Later and Go Global in the US: Martin Verwijmeren, CEO of MP Objects (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: You provide this to e-commerce companies? Martin Verwijmeren: Yes. We have two markets. On one hand, we have brand owners including manufacturers, wholesalers, or retailers. They want to orchestrate their supply chains better. They make use of MPO. Within that market, we focus on consumer products. We also focus on industrial markets. Think
Bootstrap First in Europe, Raise Money Later and Go Global in the US: Martin Verwijmeren, CEO of MP Objects (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: Can you give us an example? Maybe work through a customer use case so that we understand exactly what you are talking about. Martin Verwijmeren: I’ll also explain how we go to market. MP Objects is a platform to support companies in their supply chain orchestration so that they can, through their customers,