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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
Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I got this. You basically had a project within IBM that IBM didn’t want to pursue. You wanted to pursue it and, with IBM’s blessing, you spun it out as a separate company? Frank Sheppard: Correct. IBM had no part in the founding of that company except to say
Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: Are the real estate agents part of this marketplace or are you working with buyers and sellers, and the brokers are out of the picture? Jeff Frieden: The brokers are in the picture. Sramana Mitra: The people who are actually handling the transactions are still the brokers. Jeff Frieden: We go directly to
Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 1)
Frank and his co-founders have built a sizeable bootstrapped business in North Carolina. Read on to learn what has worked for Ateb and what you can learn from them. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your story. Where do you come from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of
Bootstrapping a Highly Profitable Company in Social Media Marketing: Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford (Part 6)
Jamie Tedford: Acquisition was strategically important for us because it completed what we thought was an important part of our story and what the market was telling us, which is that brands and agencies wanted to work from one platform. There’s this converged media phrase that had taken hold at that time. We really believed
Bootstrapping a Highly Profitable Company in Social Media Marketing: Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: We are huge fans of bootstrapping entrepreneurs, so congratulations on doing that. What scale did you reach before you raised the private equity round? Jamie Tedford: We were almost a hundred people. We were very profitable and had 50% EBITDA margins. When we decided that we were going to talk to the private equity
Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: How long did this go on? How many years did you run this? Jeff Frieden: From 1980 to 1983. We once hired an auctioneer to come in one day for an auction of these televisions that we had in containers sitting out in the parking lot. We actually sold more merchandise in that one
Bootstrapping a Highly Profitable Company in Social Media Marketing: Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford (Part 4)
Jamie Tedford: We took a step back at that moment and thought, “We’re sitting on a tremendous amount of equity value.” We had now become, not just a strategic partner of Facebook, but we had also accessed the Twitter platform as well as LinkedIn and thought about how we could become the preeminent software for
Bootstrapping a Billion Dollar Unicorn in Online Real Estate: Auction.com CEO Jeff Frieden (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page. Jeff Frieden bootstrapped Auction.com to about $180 million in revenue and profitability. Thereafter, he raised private equity financing and growth capital and is currently running a private company that is more than qualified to be a public Unicorn. The company
