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HOT TOPICS
- 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
From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 1)
Anthony started a CRM app in Australia that became the No. 1 on the Google App Store. VCs started calling. Anthony moved to San Francisco and has built a robust company with funding from Emergence Capital. Very cool story! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from?
Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: How do you compete with these hundred different competitors? JT Marino: We built the company our way. We cannot compete the same way they do. If we want to compete like a Casper, we cannot beat them dollar per dollar in ad spend. We have to be very careful how we purchase our
Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Where was that factory? JT Marino: That was in Southern California. They were willing to take a chance. Their primary business wasn’t even mattresses. We had to go to a factory that didn’t produce mattresses and convince them to produce them. As far as the marketing side goes, we were using family, friends,
Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 2)
JT Marino: We shut the site down and quit our jobs. We officially launched Tuft & Needle in October of 2012. The primary differentiation for us was that we were direct to consumer. We had just one model. This was very contrarian to the entire industry. There’s no company that makes one model. There’s firm,
Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 1)
Online mattress is the hottest e-commerce category these days, and here is yet another one delivering venture scale growth without venture capital. 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? JT Marino: I was born in Phoenix,
Bootstrapping with Services: 2600Hz CEO Patrick Sullivan (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: They take over the product roadmap and they don’t pay enough. You lose control of the process and become their outsourced development shop. Patrick Sullivan: That’s exactly what happens. When you’re stuck in the middle of it, you still get swayed by the brand recognition. That was the hard part. I remember five
Bootstrapping with Services: 2600Hz CEO Patrick Sullivan (Part 5)
Patrick Sullivan: It turns out our billing system was turned off. We couldn’t have figured that out because it was so complex at that time. It was one of those things where it was just an eye-opener. You were working on so many different projects at the same time that you always have to fundamentally
Bootstrapping with Services: 2600Hz CEO Patrick Sullivan (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking now? Patrick Sullivan: That was between 2009 and 2011. Around 2012, we had our first real working platform. We open sourced it. The reason for open sourcing it is, we thought, “If we try to push this out to the world, let’s give this out for free. If