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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
A Textbook Case Study of Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bhavin Parikh, CEO of Magoosh (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: At that time, the competitive landscape was limited to that other company that was not as far along as you or were there other people who you were competing with? Bhavin Parikh: There were several other companies that we were competing with. There were the big institutions like Kaplan and Princeton Review. In
From Y Combinator to Customer Traction and $50 Million in Financing: MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What is the go-to market strategy? Eric Frenkiel: We started the company with zero code. Since we had that ability to focus on what we wanted to build into the product, we’ve been able to build enterprise-grade features into MemSQL in a very short period of time. Our hurried go-to market strategy is
A Textbook Case Study of Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bhavin Parikh, CEO of Magoosh (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: At what point did you actually start getting more deliberate and intentional about the customer acquisition? Bhavin Parikh: To fill in the timeline, that was fall of 2009 when we launched the product. We were still in school. During that time, we actually tried hard to figure out customer acquisition but we really just
Bootstrapping from Belgium: iText CEO Bruno Lowagie (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Was this something that you created on the side? It was your own intellectual property. Bruno Lowagie: Yes. Sramana Mitra: This was in 2000? Bruno Lowagie: Yes. Sramana Mitra: What does that first release mean? Did you give it to the open source? Bruno Lowagie: I released it initially in LGPL library but then a
From Y Combinator to Customer Traction and $50 Million in Financing: MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: What is the rationale behind relational database at this point? Eric Frenkiel: That’s a great question. In fact, it’s one of the first questions our investors asked us, “Why are you building a relational database? The entire world is going to NoSQL.” We had a very contrarian view at that time, which was that
A Textbook Case Study of Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Bhavin Parikh, CEO of Magoosh (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: I have two questions. This was not a freelancer. It was a development company ,but you took one guy out of that company as a dedicated resource. Bhavin Parikh: That is correct. Sramana Mitra: How did you find it? How did you select this particular company? Bhavin Parikh: In our case, Pejman found
Bootstrapping from Belgium: iText CEO Bruno Lowagie (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: Then what happens next? Bruno Lowagie: I had three different jobs in the first two years of my career because I saw myself as a guru. When I went to a job interview, I said, “I want to be the guru in something.” Obviously, they said, “We don’t need a guru. We need somebody
From Y Combinator to Customer Traction and $50 Million in Financing: MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at Facebook? Eric Frenkiel: Not very long, it was for 10 months in total. It was an amazing opportunity. We ultimately left Facebook because we had a bigger opportunity that we wanted to build. That was MemSQL. We joined in 2010 and left in early 2011. That was a
