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
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Not all categories of e-commerce have very slim margins. We’ve got great stories of bootstrapped e-commerce companies. I think in your case, pet foods doesn’t have a lot of margin. Joe Speiser: It doesn’t. When we started, the gross margins on pet food were actually very high. But it’s the shipping that takes
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Ensighten CEO Josh Manion (Part 1)
Josh is a fellow MIT alum, and a fellow believer in the tried and true methodology that we espouse in 1M/1M: Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later. Josh raised his Series A with $5M in revenue. The company today is growing at 150% year-over-year. Wonderful story! Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning of
Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 3)
Andy Gotshalk: This technology was invented at the University of Utah, so our company is in Salt Lake City because of that. There was another professor at the University of Utah who had a strong business mind, which you don’t find too often. He was heavily involved in developing new advanced parts of the same technology and
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 3)
Joe Speiser: In 2005, we were a very profitable business and were scaling quickly. We had 50 to 60 employees at that time. This was my first large business, so I felt that we needed help. We needed some outside experience to guide us on how to scale this company. We brought on private equity. We
Bootstrapping to $20 Million with Intelligent Financial Engineering: Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: Given that the market is $45 billion, there’s obviously a huge amount of head room to build a larger business here. Could you have grown a lot faster? Are there levers that you could push? I’m not saying that you should grow faster. I’m asking out of intellectual curiosity. Tim Hentschel: There definitely
Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 2)
Andy Gotshalk: I also started taking some classes and thought about the idea of going to business school full-time. I never went back to business school so to this day, I still don’t have an MBA. I did take some key classes along the way, which provided a good foundation for me. The biggest thing
Entrepreneurship in Utah: Blackrock CEO Andy Gotshalk (Part 1)
We have covered quite a few Utah companies already like Pluralsight, InsideSales, and Steals.com. Here is another interesting entrepreneurial story out of the mini tech startup hub in Utah. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Joe Speiser, CEO of Little Things (Part 1)
Joe bootstrapped his first digital media/ad network business to $50 million in revenue and then sold it to private equity. Later he started a second business, an e-commerce company, that he bootstrapped for a year and then raised venture capital. His third business is a spin-off within the second business that takes him back to
