categories
HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
entrepreneur journeys
Building a Fast Growth, Cutting-Edge Insurance Brokerage: Karn Saroya, CEO of Cover (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: You got an offer to join YCombinator. What was your acqui-hire deal? Was it an earn-out deal? Karn Saroya: We didn’t completely vest. It was okay with us largely because we had quite a bit of conviction around what we wanted to do next. The team was most comfortable building products at the
Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Neil Vaswani, CEO of Corestream (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What year did you start Corestream? Neil Vaswani: In 2005, I realized that there was this inefficiency in the market. Then in 2005, I sought capital. In 2006, we closed capital. In 2008, we went to market. Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a little bit about what was the idea. What prompted Corestream? Neil
Building a Fast Growth, Cutting-Edge Insurance Brokerage: Karn Saroya, CEO of Cover (Part 2)
Karn Saroya: Ultimately, we were acqui-hired at Shopify. We got to build all sorts of interesting things. We worked on the Facebook Messenger chat bot for commerce. We got to work with Toby a little bit. Having been there for a couple of months, we still had the itch. We decided that we wanted to
Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Neil Vaswani, CEO of Corestream (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Neil has turned a $3M investment into a ~$10M annual revenue company by addressing a cumbersome piece of workflow in benefits management. Read on to learn how. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born,
Building a Fast Growth, Cutting-Edge Insurance Brokerage: Karn Saroya, CEO of Cover (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. This is a terrific story of a team that has tremendous expertise in building and acquiring customers for consumer apps, and how they applied that unfair advantage to disrupt a domain (insurance). Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you
Building a VC-Funded B2C CRM Company From Virginia: Zaius Founder and CTO Spencer Pingry (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: What is the distribution? Is Boston engineering? Spencer Pingry: The Engineering team is split between Boston and Virginia. It’s pretty even right now. All of our sales and marketing and CS employees are in Boston. Sramana Mitra: You now started getting your team more organized in terms of functionality. What happens next? Spencer Pingry:
Building a VC-Funded B2C CRM Company From Virginia: Zaius Founder and CTO Spencer Pingry (Part 4)
Spencer Pingry: In early 2016, we decided to launch a freemium product. We offered our entire product for free primarily to get as many interactions with as many customers as possible in the shortest time possible. For about five to six months, we hired some new go-to market people. We did a ton of SEM and
Building a VC-Funded B2C CRM Company From Virginia: Zaius Founder and CTO Spencer Pingry (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Chronologically, where are you at this point? Spencer Pingry: Around the end of 2013. Sramana Mitra: You’ve been in the market now for a year and a half? Spencer Pingry: For the first portion of it, the company’s name was Voodoo Lunchbox. As we went out to look for funding, we raised capital
