categories
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
entrepreneur journeys
Taking a Capital Efficient Company Public and Beyond: Medidata CEO Tarek Sherif (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to when you decided to get together and start this company. What was the idea? What did they want to do? It sounds like they brought the technical and domain knowledge about the CRO industry. What did they have? What was in their mind that they wanted to do? Tarek
Taking a Capital Efficient Company Public and Beyond: Medidata CEO Tarek Sherif (Part 2)
Tarek Sherif: Working for a large corporation was a good experience in the sense that I figured out what I didn’t want to do. I came out of there determined to never be in a role where I didn’t have a large measure of control. As I used to joke about it, I ended up
Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Who is the biggest of your partners? Josh Kamrath: D2L and Cengage are tied right now. Sramana Mitra: They have course material and you complement that with the video assessment. Josh Kamrath: There are two different partners. There is a content partner and what you just described is exactly what it is. They
Taking a Capital Efficient Company Public and Beyond: Medidata CEO Tarek Sherif (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. We’ve covered Medidata in TLHIT before. This time, we look at the entrepreneurial journey of this wonderful company. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of the journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Tarek Sherif:
Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: How did you sell? Selling faculty-by-faculty and direct door-to-door is not a viable scalable model. How did you actually get to market? Josh Kamrath: To answer your question directly, we were selling direct door-to-door. Then we evolved into selling more enterprise-oriented deals. Instead of going to individual faculty, we would go to directors
Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: How far did you get? In terms of metrics, how long did it take you to reach your first million in revenue? Josh Kamrath: It took a solid three years to get to the first million. As we were getting to around a million, we expanded our focus in terms of the business
Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: We’re avid users of Upwork. We really believe in that whole virtual staffing model. Josh Kamrath: For a big and long part of our history, we used Upwork to get the first iteration of our products to market. We found some developers in Ukraine. We did a bake-off. I had three different teams
Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bongo CEO Josh Kamrath (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Bongo has turned a ~$1M investment into $6M+ in annual revenue with a compelling growth projection in the next couple of years. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of
