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
Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March (Part 2)
Joshua March: I set out to build this business with no real mentors and no experience on how to do e-commerce. I managed to get off the ground and have a small, live business. I even hired a team to build a website. Then the financial crisis happened. The whole saga lasted for about a year and
Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March (Part 1)
Josh March first built a digital marketing agency around social media before identifying the product opportunity for Conversocial. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised, and in what kind of background? Joshua March: I grew up in a relatively small
Bootstrap First, Raise Money from Kleiner Perkins Later: William King, CEO of Zephyr Health (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: You raised $15 million in this round? William King: Yes. Sramana Mitra: That’s all the financing that you have raised so far? William King: Correct. Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about how you framed TAM for your business. What is the TAM model that you’ve been using? William King: I’ll just give
Self-Financing an Artificial Intelligence Software Company: John Rauscher, CEO of Yseop (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: What do you want to do with this company? You have built a profitable company growing at 80%. What do you want to do with it? John Rauscher: We want to become public. We want to keep on building and growing. As we have been positive, becoming public may come sooner than we
Bootstrap First, Raise Money from Kleiner Perkins Later: William King, CEO of Zephyr Health (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: This, by the way, is also a trend. For the longest time, the buyers of IT were IT departments of corporations. Today and going forward, the buyers are much more going to be the business users. The marketing department, for instance, is becoming a huge buyer of IT and other departments as well.
Bootstrap First, Raise Money from Kleiner Perkins Later: William King, CEO of Zephyr Health (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: That’s the beauty of this bootstrap first, raise money later model. You’re going out to raise from a position of strength as opposed to weakness. You’re not begging for money. You’re in the negotiating position. In any given time in the market, there is more money chasing fundable deals than fundable solid deals
Self-Financing an Artificial Intelligence Software Company: John Rauscher, CEO of Yseop (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about sales. How did sales ramp at that point? John Rauscher: Of course, it was not easy. I cannot remember that it was a big start. We had to convince a lot. We had to be passionate. We had to be very good at delivery. My philosophy is we cannot lie.
Self-Financing an Artificial Intelligence Software Company: John Rauscher, CEO of Yseop (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: You got your first customer in 2007. How much money did you put into this? John Rauscher: A few millions. Sramana Mitra: Right at the beginning, you put a few millions in the company, right away? John Rauscher: No, not right away. We stopped looking for customers when we understood that people didn’t
