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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
Genesis to Acquisition: Mike Morris, CEO of Topcoder (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Was it bootstrapped? How did you get this off the ground? Mike Morris: It was self-funded. The majority came from the Chairman Jack Hughes. He was the Founder and Chairman of Tallan. He had a lot of capital. There were other people, myself included, who invested in the early stages of Topcoder. To
Genesis to Acquisition: Mike Morris, CEO of Topcoder (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: Where does that bring us up to, timeline-wise? Mike Morris: That brings us up to 2001. That’s when the next major shift in my career happened. That was the time where we had gone through our first year after the acquisition. The economy wasn’t fantastic, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. I moved back
Genesis to Acquisition: Mike Morris, CEO of Topcoder (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Mike founded Topcoder, then left and joined Appirio. Appirio acquired Topcoder. Wipro then acquired both Appirio and Topcoder. Very interesting storyline. 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
Bootstrapping Using Services to $40 Million: ActiveCampaign CEO Jason VandeBoom (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: What else is tricky that is worth discussing that people can learn from? Jason VandeBoom: I think it’s really trying to find that optimal speed of growing. Just in the last 12 months alone, a lot of people can look at our company and say, “Why don’t you triple the sales team?” I
Bootstrapping Using Services to $40 Million: ActiveCampaign CEO Jason VandeBoom (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: This $20 million that you brought in, did you deploy it into operations or did the founders take liquidity from that investment? Jason VandeBoom: It’s mostly just there for making the right decisions. We haven’t really deployed it. It was never our intent to push that to sales and marketing, which is the
Bootstrapping Using Services to $40 Million: ActiveCampaign CEO Jason VandeBoom (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What was the next inflection point? Jason VandeBoom: Right as we were getting comfortable with SaaS, we were still very much similar to being a contact list management tool. We quickly realized that we don’t want to be an email marketing company. It didn’t follow any of our beliefs. It didn’t even follow
Bootstrapping Using Services to $40 Million: ActiveCampaign CEO Jason VandeBoom (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: How did you tackle that change? Jason VandeBoom: We made the decision to make the switch. This was a big change, but we did it very slowly. Sramana Mitra: When was this? Jason VandeBoom: Around 2012. We started offering this recurring option and we just put it in the background and then we
Bootstrapping Using Services to $40 Million: ActiveCampaign CEO Jason VandeBoom (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: This is an entrepreneur’s journey that we are trying to capture. When you started, what did you start with? Jason VandeBoom: I started with the bare bones of just communicating with customers. Think of a system that brings in customer names and email addresses and you can send a campaign to them. I
