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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
Scaling a Fast Growth, Venture-Funded Company: Rafael Sweary, Co-Founder and President of WalkMe (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: What are you seeing now? Where to from here? You have raised almost $100 million worth of financing. You have very good metrics. You’re scaling nicely. Do you see an IPO soon? Rafael Sweary: Not soon. I think an IPO is a very likely scenario, but the timing of an IPO is something
Master Bootstrapper with a Billion Plus in Exits: Bhavin Turakhia, CEO of Directi and Flock (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: Any other businesses that you want to talk about? Bhavin Turakhia: After that, I started two more — Flock and Zeta. Flock is in the enterprise and team messaging space, and Zeta is in the payment space. I started Zeta with a co-founder in India, and the business is currently largely managed by
Master Bootstrapper with a Billion Plus in Exits: Bhavin Turakhia, CEO of Directi and Flock (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: What scale did you get to with that business before you exited? Bhavin Turakhia: In the public domain, we exited that business at a valuation of $900 million to this consortium of investors in a public company in China. This happened in August of 2016. It was the third largest ad tech deal
Scaling a Fast Growth, Venture-Funded Company: Rafael Sweary, Co-Founder and President of WalkMe (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: What I’m hearing is that you came to the conclusion that you wanted to cater to large enterprises. Based on what you were describing, that was my first instinct to hear that this needs to be an enterprise sale. I was actually surprised that you were going the route of selling online. It
Master Bootstrapper with a Billion Plus in Exits: Bhavin Turakhia, CEO of Directi and Flock (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: In parallel, you started other businesses. At what point did you start the next line of business besides web presence? What was the thinking behind that? What were the circumstances? Bhavin Turakhia: In 2007, we started dabbling in the online advertising business using a brand called Scenzo. My brother started operating that business.
Scaling a Fast Growth, Venture-Funded Company: Rafael Sweary, Co-Founder and President of WalkMe (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: When you were selling to a customer, what kind of average deal size were you seeing? Rafael Sweary: In the hundreds of dollars per year at that time. Once we got into the pricing, we started selling over the Internet. We got our first customers through dialing. After we got some four or five
Master Bootstrapper with a Billion Plus in Exits: Bhavin Turakhia, CEO of Directi and Flock (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: How long did you go in this mode of in-person selling? What kind of revenue level did that get you to? Bhavin Turakhia: In that first set of businesses, which we call the web presence business, I actually did in-person selling for the better part of six years. Sramana Mitra: There’s no choice.
Scaling a Fast Growth, Venture-Funded Company: Rafael Sweary, Co-Founder and President of WalkMe (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: What were you going to do with WalkMe? Rafael Sweary: The initial plan was to sell it as a platform for guidance on top of any website. This is how we started. We saw that we had a nice revenue. We were growing, but we weren’t growing fast enough. We launched the product