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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
Buying Control Back from VCs: Jason Robbins, CEO of ePromos (Part 4)
Jason Robbins: Eventually, I took a little bit of what I knew from the promotional products business and a little bit of what I knew from catalogs and the website I wanted to build, and I started ePromos.com. That was a business that was designed to create a website with merchandise and start finding the
Buying Control Back from VCs: Jason Robbins, CEO of ePromos (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Why did you want to do that? That made no sense to me. Jason Robbins: I know. I just felt that it was tough out there. Real estate is the long-term play. Now, I’m basically chasing a stock I sold. If I stayed at Goldman Sachs and didn’t bother about getting my MBA and
Innovating in Fintech: Jason Hogg, CEO of Lending.com (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: What does that mean? Are we talking about a regular credit card issued that’s your card? Jason Hogg: It was a Revolution card. We had our own brand and our own network. When you walk into a CVS and you see a MasterCard, Visa, and AmEx sticker in the window, you would also
Innovating in Fintech: Jason Hogg, CEO of Lending.com (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What year did you do the $10 million first round financing? Jason Hogg: It was a year later. We did the $10 million financing in May of 2006. I had this idea in my head when I made that connection that I told you about all the way back in 2001. It was
Innovating in Fintech: Jason Hogg, CEO of Lending.com (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: At that point, what did you tell them? What were you going to deliver for them? Jason Hogg: I was going to build them the first non-proprietary credit card network in America that would simultaneously have peer-to-peer transfer capability which only PayPal had at that time. I could build a proof of concept to
Buying Control Back from VCs: Jason Robbins, CEO of ePromos (Part 1)
Jason raised both angel round and a VC round early on, but eventually, the company turned out to be a good, solid, profitable business, but not the kind of rocket VCs like to fund. Read how he negotiated with them to gain control of the venture. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of
Innovating in Fintech: Jason Hogg, CEO of Lending.com (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What year does that bring us up to now? Jason Hogg: We’re now in 2002. The timing was actually interesting because when I was graduating from Cornell, the first dot-com bomb had gone off. There were a series of venture capital and private equity shops that had made co-investments in a number of
Building a Capital Marketplace for Mid-Market Businesses: Axial CEO Peter Lehrman (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: Was that $1 million in the beginning the only capital infusion or have you had other capital infusions? Peter Lehrman: Since then, we’ve raised another $20 million. Sramana Mitra: Walk me through the chronology of those rounds of financing. Peter Lehrman: The subsequent $20 million has been raised across three financing rounds. The
