An Animal Lover’s Beautiful Journey: Elephant Pants CEO Nathan Coleman (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Nathan is a true animal lover, and has built a wonderful niche e-commerce company with the mission of helping elephants. Beautiful story. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where are you born, raised, and in what

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Bootstrapping from the UK to Over $10 Million: Roger Hale, Co-Founder of Linguamatics (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is the geographical spread of your business? How have you gone about approaching the geographical expansion? Roger Hale: It is predominantly US. Something like 70% of our sales is in the US. Sramana Mitra: When did you start selling in the US? Roger Hale: Right away. Astra Zeneca was US.

Bootstrapping from the UK to Over $10 Million: Roger Hale, Co-Founder of Linguamatics (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next major strategic move in the company’s evolution? Roger Hale: I’m not sure there was an inflection point around that time. We were continuing to develop the product. We had customers. They were quite demanding customers. They wanted new features in the product. There was a lot of work just to

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Bootstrapping from the UK to Over $10 Million: Roger Hale, Co-Founder of Linguamatics (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to build a product that you could service the pharmaceutical industry with? Roger Hale: The business was formed in 2001, but we started in 2002. We immediately started working on the product. We had some prototypes available within the year. We , in fact, sold our first

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Bootstrap to $25 Million from Utah, Raise Money Later to Scale to $100 Million: John Pope, CEO of Jive (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What did this $21 million, which you raised, enable you to do that you couldn’t have done organically? John Pope: Not all of it was direct. We had some secondary in there. Out of respect to the guy who moved on, I won’t say exactly how much. The funding that we used as

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Bootstrapping from the UK to Over $10 Million: Roger Hale, Co-Founder of Linguamatics (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you start Linguamatics? Roger Hale: In 2001, right after the dot-com bubble. I had always been interested in starting a company. I don’t really like working for other people. The key moment in starting Linguamatics was SRI deciding to wind down and shut down its Cambridge lab. We felt that

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Bootstrapping from the UK to Over $10 Million: Roger Hale, Co-Founder of Linguamatics (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Cambridge, England is a great place for high-end technical talent. This story traces the journey of a group of such talented people with core expertise in Natural Language Processing, and how they turned their expertise into a robust, profitable business. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the

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Bootstrap to $25 Million from Utah, Raise Money Later to Scale to $100 Million: John Pope, CEO of Jive (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did it impact the revenues? How long did it take for you to start producing really strong multipliers on your revenue numbers using the channel? John Pope: It had an immediate impact. We were starting from nothing back then but we’ve built a third of our business through the indirect channel. We’re

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